When new fileds are created as variable characters they get stored as latin1_swedish_ci as default. To change the default collation users will have to manually select the collation of their choice from the mysql admin interface such as in the case of phpmyadmin or will have to denote it in sql queries. To make a specific collation as the default, other option to give mysql an indication of it by having the needed collation name in my.cnf (mysql configuration) as shown below Edit my.cnf: [mysqld] collation_server=latin1_general_ci (more…)

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…)