Question

MySQL supports more than 70 collations, but how should I use them properly?

I’m always using utf8_general_ci because it feels general 🙂

But are there cases when I need other collations too? For example in a multi-lingual website or something? (what feels a bit strange because for that there are server side scripting methods).

So should I bother with them?

Answer 1

Choose a sensible default (or just use the native database default), you can then override the default collation in a query if necessary.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-collate.html