Chapter 123. Character Sets and Collations in MySQL

A character set always has at least one collation. It may have several collations.

For example, character set latin1 (``ISO-8859-1 West European'') has the following collations:

CollationMeaning
latin1_binBinary according to latin1 encoding
latin1_danish_ciDanish/Norwegian
latin1_german1_ciGerman DIN-1
latin1_german2_ciGerman DIN-2
latin1_spanish_ciModern Spanish
latin1_swedish_ciSwedish/Finnish
latin1_general_ciMultilingual

Notes:

Notice that there is a convention for collation names: They start with the name of the character set they are associated with, they usually include a language name, and they end with _ci (case insensitive), _cs (case sensitive), or _bin (binary).