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Asked: 2026-05-15T23:23:48+00:00

I Understand Character sets but I don’t understand Collation. I know you get a

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I Understand Character sets but I don’t understand Collation. I know you get a default collation with every Character set in Mysql or any RDBMS but I still don’t get it! Can someone please explain in layman terms?

Thank you in advance 😉

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  1. Editorial Team

    The main point of a database collation is determining how data is sorted and compared.

    Case sensitivity of string comparisons 

    SELECT "New York" = "NEW YORK";`

    will return true for a case insensitive collation; false for a case sensitive one.

    Which collation does which can be told by the _ci and _cs suffix in the collation’s name. _bin collations do binary comparisons (strings must be 100% identical).

    Comparison of umlauts/accented characters

    the collation also determines whether accented characters are treated as their latin base counterparts in string comparisons.

    SELECT "Düsseldorf" =  "Dusseldorf";
SELECT "Èclair" =      "Eclair";

    will return true in the former case; false in the latter. You will need to read each collation’s description to find out which is which.

    String sorting

    The collation influences the way strings are sorted.

    For example,

    • Umlauts Ä Ö Ü are at the end of the alphabet in the finnish/swedish alphabet latin1_swedish_ci

    • they are treated as A O U in German DIN-1 sorting (latin_german1_ci)

    • and as AE OE UE in German DIN-2 sorting (latin_german2_ci). (“phone book” sorting)

    • In latin1_spanish_ci, “ñ” (n-tilde) is a separate letter between “n” and “o”.

    These rules will result in different sort orders when non-latin characters are used.

    Using collations at runtime

    You have to choose a collation for your table and columns, but if you don’t mind the performance hit, you can force database operations into a certain collation at runtime using the COLLATE keyword.

    This will sort table by the name column using German DIN-2 sorting rules:

    SELECT name
FROM table
ORDER BY name COLLATE latin1_german2_ci;

    Using COLLATE at runtime will have performance implications, as each column has to be converted during the query. So think twice before applying this do large data sets.

    MySQL Reference:

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