What is collation in MySQL Database?

Answer 1

Collation in MySQL Database is a set of rules used in comparisons. Because many people use MySQL with data to be stored in languages other than English, they need to select the rules of comparisons which in turn depends on the character set used for storing that data.

In MySQL, data is stored using a specific character set, which can be defind at different levels; i.e., the sever, the database, the table, and the column levels. Each character set has a default collation; for instance, the Latine1 character set uses the latin1_swedish_ci collation which is the Swedish case insensitive order. Usually, when someone develops an application that involves localization (using the local language; e.g., Arabic) or Internationalization (i.e., using multiple languages), they resort to Unicode (utf-8) which has several collations. In general, it is a good idea to set the character set to utf-8 and select the relevant collation or just accept the default utf8-general-ci.

Reference

[1] MySQL Reference, Character Sets and Collations in General. Available at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-general.html