Cast Functions and Operators • CONVERT( expr  USING  transcoding_name ) ,  CONVERT( expr , type ) The  CONVERT()  function takes an expression of any type and produces a result value of the specified type. CONVERT(... USING ...)  is standard SQL syntax. The non- USING  form of  CONVERT()  is ODBC syntax. CONVERT( expr  USING  transcoding_name )  converts data between different character sets. In MySQL, transcoding names are the same as the corresponding character set names. For example, this statement converts the string  ’abc’  in the default character set to the corresponding string in the utf8mb4  character set: CONVERT( expr ,  type )  syntax (without  USING ) takes an expression and a  type  value specifying the result type. This operation may also be expressed as  CAST( expr  AS  type ) , which is equivalent. These  type  values are permitted: Produces a string with the  BINARY  data type. For a description of how this affects comparisons, see Section 11.3.3, “The BINARY and VARBINARY Types” . If the optional length  N  is given,  BINARY( N ) • BINARY[( N )] SELECT CONVERT(’abc’ USING utf8mb4); 2236