MySQL - refusing to run set names?

Quick question as I have never run into 开发者_Python百科this before.

On a webhost I am running the query:

SET NAMES 'utf8'

This is returning the following error:

Error: Unknown system variable 'NAMES'

I haven't run across this before. I get similar errors when trying to specify CURRENT_TIMESTAMP as a default column value as well as setting the collation of a table.

The MySQL queries I am running have worked on literally hundreds of hosting accounts before this one. On contacting the host I was fobbed off saying it was probably my code.

Is the likely hood that this is a dodgy MySQL install? Host says they are running MySQL5

SET NAMES is available since MySQL 4.1, which brought large scale changes to character set handling and full UTF-8 support. Quite sure you have a MySQL version <4.1 in front of you. Try a

SELECT VERSION();

as a1ex07 has recommended.

Older versions of MySQL can only handle 8-bit character data. They can still store UTF-8 data as byte sequences, but they are not aware of it. There are several backdraws to storing UTF-8 in MySQL <4.1. For example string lengths can exceed given column limits although the number of characters should fit. Also the modern string comparison functions do not exist (they correctly compare special characters and different ways to write them, i.e. "ß" vs. "ss" in German).