Illegal mix of collations for operation 'concat'

Question

I\'m trying to execute this concat query in mysql

SELECT CONCAT(if(fName,fName,\'\'),Name) 
From Student

Error:

#127

Answer 1

It can also be an error with your client library being too old for the mysql server.
We had a similar problem with LIKE and the character "ő" and using PHP MySQL library version 5.1.52 but MySQL server version 5.5.22.
The problem has gone away upon upgrading the client library.