Question : MySql 4.1 collation question

I just moved to a new database server and I had the host installed version 4.1 of MySql, previously I was using version 3.x.  Now after dumping the data and inserting it into MySql I'm finding a lot of syntax differences which have made it difficult for my 3.4gig database dump to run smoothly.

After looking around in myphpadmin i reallize this new thing called Collation and mine is set to latin1_swedish_ci, I can not recall selecting that so perhaps it was defaulted.  However when I run a query using the PASSWORD() function it tells me that there's a collation mismatch.  My question is my site uses American english so is the latin1_swedish_ci the setting to use and if not what should it be?  If it's not the right setting how do I change the entire database including tables and coloms to the same Collation all in one shot?  I reallize that the collation seem to be set at different levels.

was 4.1.7 a bad choice seeing that it's a new release?

Answer : MySql 4.1 collation question

4.1.7 offers many new features that you might find useful, but can also present some interface problems with the API, especially with PHP. Since PHP no longer bundles the MySQL libraries, setting up PHP to work with MySQL 4.1.x and the mysqli library can be a little complex. I would only use 4.1.x if you can identify specific features you can't do without.

swedish collation is the default for latin and is recommended since it allows for the most accurate sorting of special characters. It should not present you with any problems.

If you have upgraded MySQL from an older version, you will need to run the mysql_fix_privilege_tables script to correct potential incompatibilities with the longer 4.1 hashing methods.

This manual entry should point you in the right direction:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Password_hashing.html