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

The above answer is great, but it doesn't actually provide an example that saves the user from having to look up the syntax:

show table status like 'test';

Where test is the table name.

(Corrected as per comments below.)

Answer 2

SHOW TABLE STATUS shows information about a table, including the collation.

For example SHOW TABLE STATUS where name like 'TABLE_NAME'

Answer 3

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';

Answer 4

Use this query:

SHOW CREATE TABLE tablename

You will get all information related to table.