The SHOW COLUMNS statement now displays the collations of a table's columns, when invoked as SHOW FULL COLUMNS. Columns with CHAR, VARCHAR, or TEXT datatypes have non-NULL collations. Numeric and other non-character types have NULL collations. For example:
mysql> SHOW FULL COLUMNS FROM a; +-------+---------+-------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+ | Field | Type | Collation | Null | Key | Default | Extra | +-------+---------+-------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+ | a | char(1) | latin1_swedish_ci | YES | | NULL | | | b | int(11) | NULL | YES | | NULL | | +-------+---------+-------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+ 2 rows in set (0.02 sec)
The character set is not part of the display.