utf8mb4

[Jeff Steele]

I apologize if this is not the correct forum for this question. I am using Mysql Cluster version 5.7.29-ndb-7.5.17-cluster-gpl. I have an application that uses UTF-8 encoding. However, the data appears to be stored as Latin1. Doing the query:

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'char%';

Shows that "character_set_database" and "character_set_server" are set to "latin1". I understand that I can change these by doing "ALTER DATABASE dbname CHARACTER SET utf8mb4;".

If I alter the database, can I expect any negative impact? Commonsense suggests that none of the current Latin1 characters will be affected. Is that correct?

Thanks for any assistance.