Mysql list databases with colaltion12/3/2023 How do I figure out which character set and collation to use if I need to support language X? Use whatever‘s provided by your database management system – in MySQL, the default character set is usually utf8mb4 (see answers to the questions below for its meaning), for other database management systems, the collations and character sets may differ, but if you don‘t have any specific requirements, its best to leave them intact. What Collation and Character Set Should I Choose? What collation and character set is best for general use cases? Answers will help you decide on when to use a specific collations and why – if you‘re lazy, you‘re in luck, because we‘ve provided answers to most of the questions concerning charsets and collations below as well. Help can be found in the documentation, and we suggest you combine information found there with questions answered in the database part of Stack Exchange to find the best answer to your specific situation. You will have to figure that out yourself, but that can be fun as well! Where is the data being displayed and what is the use case of it?Īnswering the questions above will help you decide on where to go – if you‘re storing analytical data, the default character sets and collations are probably the least of your worries unless you‘re storing data derived from a specific geographical area that talks in a vastly different language than the western part of the world (think Chinese, Russian, Iranian, etc.) Finally, displaying data to a specific audience is also a point – if your audience doesn‘t speak English and instead is well-versed in Arabic languages, you will obviously adhere accordingly.Ĭoming back to the collations shown above, unfortunately, nor SQL clients nor database management systems will not tell you which collation is best to use with data belonging to what parts of the world.Where is the data derived from (approximate geographical area?).To choose a proper character set and collation, consider the following questions: Without character sets collations won‘t be aware of what characters to sort, and without collations, character sets won‘t be able to be displayed correctly. The main problem solved by collations and character sets is exactly that – they tell the database how to sort the data to avoid mishaps. The main problem here is that the database doesn‘t understand the characters because the collation of the database doesn‘t come with such a character set that helps it be aware of the characters being inserted. See how the username is displayed by the database (we‘re running MySQL) and how it was inserted? See the problem? No, not the double-commented piece of code on the first line – the fourth row from the top. Most people start choosing collations only after facing problems that look like the following: Yes, collations and character sets will most likely require research and digging into the documentation and most likely into community forums like StackOverflow as well, however, practice makes perfect. Most database management systems will come with a query like the one we‘re running above – such queries will show us the collation and character sets associated with that collation to help us make an easier choice. The big5_bin collation and their character sets are a fit for those supporting data of Chinese descent.Ĭollations tell the database how to sort the data – if the data we have is originating from an English-speaking part of the world, pretty much all collations will do, however, if we have Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or even Russian text, we‘re going to need to look into the character sets and collations that are being used a little deeper.Ĭhoosing a Proper Character Set and Collation.utf8mb4 character sets are a fit for those who want to support UTF-8 in their data ( in MySQL, utf8 is not the same as utf8mb3 or utf8mb4 – we‘ll get into that later).latin1 character sets are a fit for data associated with Western European languages (most data within the English-speaking world.). ![]() ![]() ![]() Default Character Sets and CollationsĪll collations in MySQL come with default character sets and vice versa – the default character set in most database management systems will be either latin1 (older versions of MySQL) or utf8 / utf8mb4 (newer versions of MySQL and the majority of other database management systems.) As you can clearly see, there are rather a lot of collations and character sets associated with those collations – some of you might be a little confused why are there so many of those in the first place, but the answer here is relatively simple: there are so many collations because each language has specifics related to it (dialect, etc.) and each of those specifics need to come with a specific set of rules for comparing characters.
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