Another easy way to convert database from Latin1 to UTF8
I tried another way by searching some articles on vbulletin but it takes me long time, many steps, and not success... I found another way to do. I hope that my experiment can help someone is running a vbulletin for a long time with latin1, and now he want to convert to utf8.
After trying by myself offline some ways to convert database from latin1 to utf8, I see that there is a simple way: less steps and really easy, and no need special tool: iconv-chunk (if the database file is too big), uconv (database tools)...
First of all. Turn off your vbulletin board. And turn off httpd/apache service to dedicate all resources for database converting.
Next step: change mysql database server configuration.
Because the default of mysql database server is running at latin1 charset. So we need to change it to UTF8 by modify my.cnf and input more settings:
default-character-set = utf8
[client]
default-character-set = utf8
After modified, restart mysql server for the changing affect...