Re: Charset SESSION vs GLOBAL

[Rick James]

Interesting. I do not have a direct answer. I have a caution... Because of confusions like this, it could be that the data you have already stored is encoded incorrectly. SHOW CREATE TABLE will tell you what encoding _should_ be in the fields. SELECT HEX() will give you clues of what _is_ in the fields.

SET NAMES (and 'char%') relate to whether the bytes are transcoded on the way in/out of the server.

See also
http://mysql.rjweb.org/doc.php/charcoll