There’s always been a confusion about Character Sets and Collation. A character set is a set of symbols and the encoding of those symbols whereas Collation defines the set of rules with which the characters in the character sets are compared Collation of a database can be changed easily using phpMyAdmin. Here are the steps:

Login to phpMyAdmin.

Select the database from the list of databases in left pane.

Click on the operations tab from the set tabs on the top.

Select the desired Collation from the ‘Collation’ dropdown in the ‘Table Options’ box.

Click ‘Go’