mysql check collation of a table

Question

How can I see what collation a table has? I.E. I want to see:

+-----------------------------+
|  table  |     collation     |
|-----------------------------|         


        

Answer 1

You can also query INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES and get the collation for a specific table:

SELECT TABLE_SCHEMA
    , TABLE_NAME
    , TABLE_COLLATION 
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
WHERE TABLE_NAME = 't_name';

that gives a much more readable output in contrast to SHOW TABLE STATUS that contains a lot of irrelevant information.

---

Note that collation can also be applied to columns (which might have a different collation than the table itself). To fetch the columns' collation for a particular table, you can query INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS:

SELECT TABLE_SCHEMA 
    , TABLE_NAME 
    , COLUMN_NAME 
    , COLLATION_NAME 
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE TABLE_NAME = 't_name';