UTF-8 vs Latin1 ( Encoding vs DEFAULT And Collate)

[Sandeep Krishan]

I am MYSQL: newbie

I wanted to understand the issues related to UTF-8 And Latin1

Show create table sometable \G;

Create Table: CREATE TABLE `sometable` (
`name` varchar(2096) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`some_id`),
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=27 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

In the above table: name: is a varchar encoding with utf_8

But this table has trhe default charset=latin1 and and i think collate is latin1 too..

If i have a Connection made from "Java" application and try to read the "name" column. Assuming the "Name" takes the data from various languages say: "Japanese", "Chinses", "hebrew", "spanish" "German" etc...

1. Do we have issues due to "Latin1" overrides "UTF8" encoding ?

2. Or, the column encoding supersedes and encoding and would be able to fetch UTF-8 encoding ?

3. Or, Do i have to convert the ISO889_1 or Latin1 to UTF-8 to avoid lose of data ?