I was having issues with my Django system after i used some default settings to solve them i used this scrip, it updates charset and collate:
#! /usr/bin/env python
import MySQLdb
host = “localhost”
passwd = “urpassword”
user = “urdbuser”
dbname = “urdbname”
db = MySQLdb.connect(host=host, user=user, passwd=passwd, db=dbname)
cursor = db.cursor()
cursor.execute(“ALTER DATABASE `%s` CHARACTER SET ‘utf8’ COLLATE ‘utf8_unicode_ci'” % dbname)
sql = “SELECT DISTINCT(table_name) FROM information_schema.columns WHERE table_schema = ‘%s'” % dbname
cursor.execute(sql)
results = cursor.fetchall()
for row in results:
sql = “ALTER TABLE `%s` convert to character set DEFAULT COLLATE DEFAULT” % (row[0])
cursor.execute(sql)
db.close()