That's not entirely true. You can "change" the charset from 1 type to another... The problem with that is fields may extend past the max length of that field wh

That's not entirely true. You can "change" the charset from 1 type to another... The problem with that is fields may extend past the max length of that field when converting from 1 to the other. Source: me. I had to help someone with specifically this when they set the wrong charset on their DB. Had these problems.