Performing Table and Database Operations - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management - page 173

This default ordering will last as long as there are no changes in the table
(no insertions, deletions, or updates). This is why phpMyAdmin shows the
(singly) warning.
After the sort has been done on author_id , topics for author 1 will be displayed
irst, followed by the topics for author 2 , and so on (we are talking about a default
browsing of the table without explicit sorting). We can also specify the sort order as
Ascending or Descending .
If we insert another row, describing a new book from author 1 , and then click on
Browse , the topic will not be displayed along with the other topics for this author
because the sort was done before the insertion.
Table collation
Character-based columns have a collation attribute that describes which character set
is used to interpret the contents, and rules for sorting. The name column currently
has a latin1_swedish_ci collation, as can be seen via the Structure page. On the
Operations page, if we change the collation for table author from latin1_swedish_ci
to, say, utf8_general_ci , this generates the following statement:
ALTER TABLE `author` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE
utf8_general_ci
Therefore, we only changed the default collation for future columns that will be
added to this table; no collation was changed for existing columns.