View MySQL database character sets and database connections

1. Use the show character set statement to list available CHARACTER sets in the database:

Mysql> show character set;

2. to list the Collation rules of a character set, use the show collation statement.

For example, to view the proofreading rules for the latin1 (Western Europe ISO-8859-1) Character Set, use the following statement to look for rules that start with latin1:

Mysql> show collation like 'latin1% ';

3. view the character set of the data table

Mysql> show create table mytable;

You can also view the SQL statements used to create the table.

4. view database connection information:

Mysql> show processlist;

Mysql> show processlist \ G;