Understanding SQL Collation: The Secret Sauce Behind String Sorting & Comparison
Collation is SQL’s rulebook for text data handling! It defines: 🔤 Case sensitivity: Is 'Apple' = 'apple'? ´ Accent sensitivity: Is 'café' = 'cafe'? 🗂️ Sorting order: Should 'Ö' come after 'Z' (German) or at the end (Swedish)? 🌐 Character encoding: UTF-8? Latin-1? (e.g., utf8mb4_unicode_ci). Real-world analogy: Collation is like a language-specific dictionary 📖 that tells the database how to “pronounce” and “alphabetize” characters! ⚙️ Anatomy of a Collation Name Decode the secret code: ...