Hello.

I have strange problem with encoding in my database, which has been already on three different mysql servers with various encodings.

At the beginning database was ISO-8859-2 (latin2). After migrations to new server
The columns are in UTF-8 (columns are: charset utf8, collate utf_general_ci).
But to display correctly national chars on site (utf-8 in php) i need to execute following commands in php after creating connection to database:
mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'latin2'", $db);
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'latin2'", $db);

When i execute those commands, national string are correctly displayed on site. I've lived with this for one year, but now i need to connect to database in Java and there those commands don't work. I need to repair it.

Questions:
1. What is the encoding of text in my database UTF-8 or latin2(ISO-8859-2) ?
2. How to repair my database to have normal UTF-8 data without any tricls with setting CHARACETER SET and NAMES to latin2?

Why don't you just change the Character set for your tables?

Obviously you're going to get strange output (i.e. in UTF-8 format) unless you change the charset you're using.

My question to you is, why do you want it in UTF-8 if you're outputting in a different character set? Why don't you just use your original charset and collation? Is there any reasoning behind storing it as UTF-8 ?

Incidently you can use a select statement to set the output collation.
example :
Also, the statements you provide above:
Are valid SQL for MySQL.
So i imagine there is no harm in doing an SQL query in Java that is "SET CHARACTER SET 'latin2'" and "SET NAMES 'latin2'" ...