Table and Database Operations - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management - page 161

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
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
To better see the issues of collation change at various levels, let's first create a new
author with a character é in his name:
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:
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.
In an effort to further test collation changes, we can go to Structure page and change
the collation of author's name column to utf8_general_ci (by clicking the Change
icon). Having done that, we browse the author table and still see correctly the é
character, because MySQL updated the contents of this column on collation change.