How to Fix Chinese Character Garbling When Migrating Oracle to MySQL

During an Oracle‑to‑MySQL migration, imported Chinese text showed as garbled characters. The client charset was correct, but the MySQL server was still using a latin1 charset, which cannot store Chinese characters.

Solution Levels

Table‑level configuration

Database‑level configuration

Server‑level configuration

Test Environment

Windows Server 2008 R2 with MySQL Community Server 5.7.16. A test database hoegh was created; its default charset was latin1.

1. Table‑level Fix

Create a table without specifying charset; insertion of a Chinese record fails because the table inherits latin1.

Recreate the table with DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 and insert both English and Chinese rows successfully.

2. Database‑level Fix

Recreate the database with CHARACTER SET=utf8, then create the table (still latin1 by default) and insert records; the database charset overrides the table charset, allowing Chinese text.

3. Server‑level Fix

Check the global variable character_set_server; it is latin1. Modify my.ini to set the server charset to UTF‑8.

default-character-set=utf8
[mysqld]
max_connections=200
default-storage-engine=INNODB
basedir=E:\mysql-5.7.16-winx64\bin
datadir=E:\mysql-5.7.16-winx64\data
port=3306
autocommit=0
character-set-server=utf8

Note: default-character-set=utf8 affects the client, while character-set-server=utf8 changes the server.

After restarting MySQL, character_set_server shows utf8.

Recreate the test database and table; insertion and queries work without errors.

Conclusion

All three methods resolve the garbled Chinese characters, but configuring the server charset via my.ini provides a permanent solution. It is strongly recommended to use UTF‑8 (the universal charset) for MySQL deployments.