title: MySQL Collation Issue
body: <p>In my company, the tables in the database were poorly created. Each table has a different collation and charset.</p>
  
  <p>This is very bad, sure, but it makes queries loose a lot of performance til the point the server crashes (and it isn't even a great database...).</p>
  
  <p>I would like to know if there are any good MySQL tools, commands or procedures for converting table collation and charset.</p>
  
  <p>Just executing the alter table and executing convert is braking special characters. Is it normal or I am doing something wrong?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong>
  As exemple: I have a table finance with uft8 collation and a table expense with latin swedish. Each table has between 1000 and 5000 rows. The following query takes about 15 second to execute:</p>
  
  <pre><code>select ex.* from expense ex
     inner join finance fin on fin.ex_id = ex.id
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Executing much complexer queries with bigger tables runs much faster when they have the same collation.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT 2:</strong>
  Another error in the database: row ids are all varchar(15), not int.</p>