MySQL Database Collation Type

Posts: 766 · Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 5:51 am

I was adding a new table to a MySQL database I run tonight and accidentally set the collation to

latin1_swedish_ci

Is this good/bad? What should I be running it on?

Posts: 746 · Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 3:22 pm

Most likely you will be ok. The swedish language is based on latin (as is evidenced by the name latin_swedish) and uses all of our standard characters as well as a few extras. Thing is, you might get some unexpected results in searches that you do because the swedish language includes extra characters or does not include some characters that you think should or should not be there. Things like alter table commands could behave in unexpected ways...even though it would be doing it correctly by the Swedish language, it may not be correct for English. Make sense?

It would if you were Swedish...

Posts: 766 · Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 5:10 pm

Ok, what *SHOULD* I be using then? Cuz I'm not Swedish I'm Southern. I checked and they don't have a setting for "Southerner".

Posts: 746 · Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 6:49 pm

I am using utf8_general_ci

don't ask me what that is cuz I dunno - but that's the deafault here.

If they ever come up with utf8_johnnyreb_ci you lemme know - I want it.

Posts: 746 · Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 7:21 pm

ha! I just noticed that some of MY database fields are using swedish collation - not the database itself but some of the fields inside have swedish collation. Wierd...maybe MySQL is swedish natively...seems to work ok for me so far...never ever looked at this stuff before today really...

Posts: 27 · Posted: Tue May 10, 2005 12:59 pm

Same thing applied here, all fields are in latin1_swedish_ci. However, I'm still not sure what impact this can cause since my websites are running great. My best guess is that these will get overwritten by the internal encoding system of web browsers.

Posts: 271 · Posted: Tue May 10, 2005 3:58 pm

You may need to run your query results through this handy conversion tool though

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--Bob

Posts: 1 · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 7:39 am

hi! this comes from mysql reference ( http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/charset-server.html):

At the server level, the decision is simple. The server character set and collation depend initially on the options that you use when you start mysqld. You can use --default-character-set for the character set, and along with it you can add --default-collation for the collation. If you don't specify a character set, that is the same as saying --default-character-set=latin1. If you specify only a character set (for example, latin1) but not a collation, that is the same as saying --default-charset=latin1 --default-collation=latin1_swedish_ci because latin1_swedish_ci is the default collation for latin1.