Illegal mix of collations error in MySql

Question

Just got this answer from a previous question and it works a treat!

SELECT username, (SUM(rating)/COUNT(*)) as TheAverage, Count(*) as TheCount 
FROM ratings         


        

Answer 1

[MySQL]

In these (very rare) cases:

• two tables that really need different collation types

• values not coming from a table, but from an explicit enumeration, for instance:

  SELECT 1 AS numbers UNION ALL SELECT 2 UNION ALL SELECT 3

you can compare the values between the different tables by using CAST or CONVERT:

CAST('my text' AS CHAR CHARACTER SET utf8)

CONVERT('my text' USING utf8)

See CONVERT and CAST documentation on MySQL website.