Hello wikiers!
I have discovered something that I am hoping is not a problem, but I cannot get a good determination on whether this is a problem or not from the online documents, so I thought I'd throw it out there...
I have many wikis, some were installed over three years ago and some recently, each time using the default character set specified by the web-based installer. I've been updating them over the years and all are now at version 1.16.0. I have been backing them up using "mysqldump" using the "--default-character-set=latin1" option as was recommended years ago. Today I decided to look a little deeper into the character set the wikis are set up to use (it's a slow Friday...). It appears a while ago, maybe over a year ago, the default character set Mediawiki set during the installation changed to "CHARSET=binary". This was also added to the LocalSettings.php file as an option to $wgDBTableOptions. In the meantime I have been doing daily backups of the databases using mysqldump and specifying "--default-character-set=latin1".
I know that if UTF-8 were specified I might have trouble but I always used the default. But I'm wondering if backing up databases that have $wgDBTableOptions set to CHARSET=binary using mysqldump with the default-character-set=latin1 option will cause any problems if I need to do a restore.
Also, the manual on backups (Manual:Backing up a wiki) says you can determine the character set by using either of these two sql queries:
mysql>status; and look for the line that says "Server characterset" or mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE text; and look for the line that says "DEFAULT CHARSET"
According to the manual both should show me the default character set the database is using and when I do this with an older database both say "latin1" but when I do this with one I just installed today I get latin1 from the "status;" query but get "binary" from the other query.
Any help in clearing this up and whether I should or should not use the --default-character-set=latin1 on the mysqldumps of the old or new databases would be appreciated.
-Jim