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. · Accepted solution]

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...

[Willem van Zyl]

Thank you Guilherme.  Got my service up an running again.

[Guilherme V.]

You're welcome, buddy 

[Alesson]

thank you guy.

[Krishna Rathi]

The above solution is not recommended on production though. You can try locking table before executing your commands and finally unlocking it.

[Bongani Mlilo]

Thank you.

[黄兵]

Thank you for your reply and helped me solve the problem.