How to get past the following "Cannot change column 'xxx': used in a foreign key constraint"

Willem van Zyl

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: MySQL Collation Repair: Table Level Changes

Example:

ALTER TABLE `CONTENT` MODIFY `CREATOR` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET UTF8 COLLATE utf8_bin;

ERROR 1832 (HY000): Cannot change column 'CREATOR': used in a foreign key constraint 'FK_CONTENT_CREATOR'

 

 

Guilherme V.

You can disable the constraints checks, run the ALTER statement and then enable the constraint checker again:

SET foreign_key_checks = 0;
ALTER TABLE `CONTENT` MODIFY `CREATOR` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET UTF8 COLLATE utf8_bin;
SET foreign_key_checks = 1;

See if it helps...