MySQL – What is Character set and Collation?

As given by MySQL documentation (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/charset-general.html): A character set is a set of symbols and encodings. A collation is a set of rules for comparing characters in a character set. Why is MySQL Collation an important consideration? Collation determines the rules in comparing characters including the case sensitiveness, accent sensitiveness, trailing space sensitiveness of the character set. (more…)