Illegal mix of collations...(Moodle+MRBS)

[beeswax]

I recently upgraded our Moodle to version Moodle 1.9.12+ (Build: 20110726) and also installed a newer version of MRBS. All seems fine except when I click on a booking made by a teacher I get the following error message -

Illegal mix of collations (utf8_general_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_unicode_ci,IMPLICIT) for operation '=' I sort of have an idea what the problem might be, but before I make any rash moves could someone explain, in layman's terms, what the solution could be?

[beeswax]

^BUMP^ Anyone?

[theriver]

Hi there.

 

I am not a MySQList but this looks like the error you get from SQL Server where it tries to compare two columns of incompatible collations (i.e. in a join).

 

 

So, column tableA.column is utf8_general_ci, tableB.column is utf8_unicode_ci, and your're running a SQL statement that attempts to join on these two columns.

 

In the SQL world the fixes are to either change the collation of one of the columns or to alter your query so that it's specifying the collation to use.

 

The thing to do is *probably* to change the database collation, but it might be worth googling ' change database collation' and see if you can find horror/success stories on doing this . . . .