[Known issues] ALTER TABLE ${table} CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8

[io except]

Our team has been tasked with migrating our entire database from latin1 to utf8 as we begin preparations to support multi-national language sets.
We updated the entire database, no problems.
I used an mysqldump ... dropped the database ... then attempted to mysql < ${file.name}

ERROR 1071 (42000) at line 711: Specified key was too long; max key length is 1000 bytes

This is where the problems all started. I have read the threads and understand that utf-8 tables can take 3 bytes to store data and that this is well documented. We have accepted this and are moving forward.

What we are wondering is what happens to that data that is too long when the conversion successfully completes. Are fields that have data that is too long in the utf8 charset simply truncated? Are there any other knows errors and exceptions that other have seen that we should be aware of.

Our database is huge and contains a lot of secured data. We will only have one chance to do the update and will test with what we can export but are looking to find is other experiences, setbacks and solutions.

Much appreciated.

Steve S Gee Jr
Chief Architect
CyberSource PS