This weekend I setup SugarCRM on my server. Impressive stuff, but to get it going, I had to upgrade to MySQL 4.1. Unfortunately this broke Drupal - I got loads of warnings about "illegal mix of collations". My system is Debian stable, Drupal 4.7, and had MySQL 4.0 which upgraded to 4.1.

I found the answer here . The long and short of it is I had to do:

alter database drupal default CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
use drupal ;
ALTER TABLE access CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

for each Drupal database. I suppose the "ALTER TABLE" should probably be scripted for every Drupal table, but just the above seemed to do the trick.

Update:

Yes, you really want to script this for every table - otherwise it keeps popping up in odd places.