Troubleshooting “Illegal mix of collations” error in mysql

Question

Am getting the below error when trying to do a select through a stored procedure in MySQL.

Illegal mix of collations (latin1_general_cs,IMPLICIT) and

Answer 1

I had a similar problem, was trying to use the FIND_IN_SET procedure with a string variable.

SET @my_var = 'string1,string2';
SELECT * from my_table WHERE FIND_IN_SET(column_name,@my_var);

and was receiving the error

Error Code: 1267. Illegal mix of collations (utf8_unicode_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,IMPLICIT) for operation 'find_in_set'

Short answer:

No need to change any collation_YYYY variables, just add the correct collation next to your variable declaration, i.e.

SET @my_var = 'string1,string2' COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
SELECT * from my_table WHERE FIND_IN_SET(column_name,@my_var);

Long answer:

I first checked the collation variables:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'collation%';
    +----------------------+-----------------+
    | Variable_name        | Value           |
    +----------------------+-----------------+
    | collation_connection | utf8_general_ci |
    +----------------------+-----------------+
    | collation_database   | utf8_general_ci |
    +----------------------+-----------------+
    | collation_server     | utf8_general_ci |
    +----------------------+-----------------+

Then I checked the table collation:

mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE my_table;

CREATE TABLE `my_table` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `column_name` varchar(40) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=125 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci;

This means that my variable was configured with the default collation of utf8_general_ci while my table was configured as utf8_unicode_ci.

By adding the COLLATE command next to the variable declaration, the variable collation matched the collation configured for the table.