Debian bug report database upgrade from schema 8 to 9 fails

[Steve Robbins]

Hi,

A Debian User reports that upgrading to Digikam 5.9.0 failed to upgrade the 
MariaDB database.   Error message (below) essentially points to an "illegal 
mix of collations".  I'm not sure how they got a mix of collations, but I'm 
wondering if there's anything the Digikam upgrade scripts can do to prevent a 
crash?

Original report at https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895937


Error messages is as follow:

"
digikam.general: AlbumWatch use QFileSystemWatcher
digikam.general: Database Parameters:
   Type:                     "QMYSQL"
   DB Core Name:             "digikamdb"
   DB Thumbs Name:           "digikam_thumbsdb"
   DB Face Name:             "digikam_faces"
   Connect Options:          ""
   Host Name:                "localhost"
   Host port:                3306
   Internal Server:          false
   Internal Server Path:     ""
   Internal Server Serv Cmd: ""
   Internal Server Init Cmd: ""
   Username:                 "digikam"
   Password:                 ""

digikam.dbengine: Loading SQL code from config file 
"/usr/share/digikam/database/dbconfig.xml"
digikam.dbengine: Checking XML version ID => expected:  3  found:  3
digikam.coredb: Core database: running schema update
digikam.coredb: Core database: have a structure version  8
digikam.coredb: Core database: makeUpdates  8  to  9
digikam.dbengine: Failure executing query:
 ""
Error messages: "QMYSQL: Unable to execute query" "Illegal mix of 
collations (utf8_general_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_unicode_ci,IMPLICIT) for 
operation '='" 1267 2
Bound values:  ()
digikam.dbengine: Error while executing DBAction [ 
"UpdateSchemaFromV7ToV9" ] Statement [ "CALL 
drop_index_if_exists('AlbumRoots', 'identifier');" ]
digikam.coredb: Core database: schema update to V 9 failed!
digikam.coredb: Core database: cannot process schema initialization
KMemoryInfo: Platform identified :  "LINUX"
KMemoryInfo: TotalRam:  16826564608
digikam.general: Allowing a cache size of 200 MB
QThreadStorage: Thread 0x7f10cf629bc0 exited after QThreadStorage 11 
destroyed
"

-Steve