MySQL error: “Column 'columnname' cannot be part of FULLTEXT index”

Question

Recently I changed a bunch of columns to utf8_general_ci (the default UTF-8 collation) but when attempting to change a particular column, I received the MySQL error:

<         


        

Answer 1

For DBeaver/database tool users.

When you use interface to modify more than one column, the tool generate commands like this :

ALTER TABLE databaseName.tableName MODIFY COLUMN columnName1 text CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_general_ci NULL;
ALTER TABLE databaseName.tableName MODIFY COLUMN columnName2 varchar(128) CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_general_ci NULL;

This is not working because you must modify the charsets at the same time.

So, you have to change it manually, in one command :

ALTER TABLE databaseName.tableName 
MODIFY COLUMN columnName1 text CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_general_ci NULL,
MODIFY COLUMN columnName2 text CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_general_ci NULL;

utf8 or utf8mb4 ? See here.