title: MySQL: adding support for Asian characters to an existing database
body: <p>I'm looking for a best-practices approach to adding support for Asian character sets to an existing database. We have existing tables that are in the <code>latin1</code> charset:</p>
  
  <pre><code>show create table books
  CREATE TABLE `books` (
    `id` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
    `category` varchar(255) default NULL,
    `contactEmail` varchar(255) default NULL,
    `description` text,
    `price` varchar(255) default NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
  ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Currently when we enter UTF8 chars for the <code>description</code> field, we get back '?' chars for Asian chars on the round-trip. Latin1 chars work just fine.</p>
  
  <p>Can I simply convert this table with something like this?</p>
  
  <pre><code>ALTER TABLE books CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I understand that this won't magically fix data already present in the table. I just want it to work properly for new data going forward.</p>
  
  <p>Do I need to worry about collation? I have no idea how that would work for non-latin characters.</p>
  
  <p>Would it make sense to make <code>utf8</code> the default for the database? Are there any caveats to that?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>