Collation help please

[owaring]

halo!

I am having some difficulty in finding guidelines for collation settings, my table wont let me have no setting for collation so i have set the fields to hp8_english_ci. however the fields that are INT will not accept this, and take no setting.

firstname is VARCHAR hp8_english_ci
id is INT AUTO_INCREMENT no collation set

i can succesfully run these queries

SELECT * 
FROM crew
WHERE id = '177'

SELECT firstname 
FROM crew
WHERE id = '177'

when i run this one

SELECT id
FROM crew
WHERE firstname = 'Darren'

i get this error

#1267 - Illegal mix of collations (hp8_english_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '='

can anyone suggest any resources explaining collations to me, or is there a setting which defines a default that can be used for all

thanks for taking the time to read this,

Merry Xmas

[Roger_Ramjet]

Yes there is a resource that explains it: MySQL documentation . Start here and then go here and here