Guys what am I doing wrong?

With VARCHAR columns, everything is fine, and BIGINT is a problem.

ALTER TABLE tbl_name MODIFY lastupdate BIGINT(20) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Gives an error message:

ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; Check the syntax for the right syntax to use the 'CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci' at line 1

Error on BIGINT, tinyint, longblob types

    1 answer 1

    Numbers and blobs (i.e. binary data) have no coding for obvious reasons. Encoding and encoding comparison - properties of text data.

    • I have utf8_unicode_ci throughout the entire database, I read that it is slower than utf8_general_ci. So how should I be, Don't touch them? - user216109
    • If you do not understand that non-text data basically cannot have a character encoding - it’s better not to do anything with character encodings at all. And once again check the availability and ability to recover data from backup. - Small