This may sound like a really simple question, but I've not found a straight answer with a lot of googling!
I have a MySQL database server which has databases with various different character encodings (largely a mix of latin1 and utf8)
Are there any recommendations when using mysqldump to back up the the entire server (one db at a time), when for each individual database I will not know what the character set is that is being used?
(I have a bash script which gets all the DBS on the server, and then runs mysqldump individually on each one - copied below)
I know I can set the default encoding to use with mysqldump by specifiying that as an argument to the mysqldump command - should I just be setting that to UTF-8? Will that be OK for the latin encoded DBs?
#!/bin/bash
mkdir `date -I`;
dblist=`mysql -h myhosthere -u myuser -pmypassword -e "show databases" | sed -n '2,$ p'`
for db in $dblist; do
mysqldump -h myhosthere -u myuser -pmypassword $db | gzip --best > home/user/`date -I`/$db.sql.gz
done;
