Character: set of symbols and encodings Encoding: set of values assigned to characters Collation: set of rule for comparing a character set
Suppose you have the following characters,
M Y S Q L
that are assigned the following values:
13 25 19 17 12
sequentially. These numbers happen to be their order in the English alphabet. So A = 1, B = 2 and so on.
MYSQL are characters. The number are encodings. The collation is based on the position in English alphabet.
MySQL has the following character sets:
mysql> show character set;
+----------+-----------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| Charset | Description | Default collation | Maxlen |
+----------+-----------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| big5 | Big5 Traditional Chinese | big5_chinese_ci | 2 |
| dec8 | DEC West European | dec8_swedish_ci | 1 |
| cp850 | DOS West European | cp850_general_ci | 1 |
| hp8 | HP West European | hp8_english_ci | 1 |
| koi8r | KOI8-R Relcom Russian | koi8r_general_ci | 1 |
| latin1 | cp1252 West European | latin1_swedish_ci | 1 |
| latin2 | ISO 8859-2 Central European | latin2_general_ci | 1 |
| swe7 | 7bit Swedish | swe7_swedish_ci | 1 |
| ascii | US ASCII | ascii_general_ci | 1 |
| ujis | EUC-JP Japanese | ujis_japanese_ci | 3 |
| sjis | Shift-JIS Japanese | sjis_japanese_ci | 2 |
| hebrew | ISO 8859-8 Hebrew | hebrew_general_ci | 1 |
| tis620 | TIS620 Thai | tis620_thai_ci | 1 |
| euckr | EUC-KR Korean | euckr_korean_ci | 2 |
| koi8u | KOI8-U Ukrainian | koi8u_general_ci | 1 |
| gb2312 | GB2312 Simplified Chinese | gb2312_chinese_ci | 2 |
| greek | ISO 8859-7 Greek | greek_general_ci | 1 |
| cp1250 | Windows Central European | cp1250_general_ci | 1 |
| gbk | GBK Simplified Chinese | gbk_chinese_ci | 2 |
| latin5 | ISO 8859-9 Turkish | latin5_turkish_ci | 1 |
| armscii8 | ARMSCII-8 Armenian | armscii8_general_ci | 1 |
| utf8 | UTF-8 Unicode | utf8_general_ci | 3 |
| ucs2 | UCS-2 Unicode | ucs2_general_ci | 2 |
| cp866 | DOS Russian | cp866_general_ci | 1 |
| keybcs2 | DOS Kamenicky Czech-Slovak | keybcs2_general_ci | 1 |
| macce | Mac Central European | macce_general_ci | 1 |
| macroman | Mac West European | macroman_general_ci | 1 |
| cp852 | DOS Central European | cp852_general_ci | 1 |
| latin7 | ISO 8859-13 Baltic | latin7_general_ci | 1 |
| utf8mb4 | UTF-8 Unicode | utf8mb4_general_ci | 4 |
| cp1251 | Windows Cyrillic | cp1251_general_ci | 1 |
| utf16 | UTF-16 Unicode | utf16_general_ci | 4 |
| cp1256 | Windows Arabic | cp1256_general_ci | 1 |
| cp1257 | Windows Baltic | cp1257_general_ci | 1 |
| utf32 | UTF-32 Unicode | utf32_general_ci | 4 |
| binary | Binary pseudo charset | binary | 1 |
| geostd8 | GEOSTD8 Georgian | geostd8_general_ci | 1 |
| cp932 | SJIS for Windows Japanese | cp932_japanese_ci | 2 |
| eucjpms | UJIS for Windows Japanese | eucjpms_japanese_ci | 3 |
+----------+-----------------------------+---------------------+--------+
and the collation is
mysql> show collation;
+--------------------------+----------+-----+---------+----------+---------+
| Collation | Charset | Id | Default | Compiled | Sortlen |
+--------------------------+----------+-----+---------+----------+---------+
| latin1_general_ci | latin1 | 48 | | Yes | 1 |
| utf8_general_ci | utf8 | 33 | Yes | Yes | 1 |
| utf8_bin | utf8 | 83 | | Yes | 1 |
| utf8_unicode_ci | utf8 | 192 | | Yes | 8 |
| ucs2_general_ci | ucs2 | 35 | Yes | Yes | 1 |
| ucs2_bin | ucs2 | 90 | | Yes | 1 |
| ucs2_unicode_ci | ucs2 | 128 | | Yes | 8 |
+--------------------------+----------+-----+---------+----------+---------+
My terminal listed 197. I am only showing a few.
Default settings for character sets and collations are set at server level, database level, table level, and column level. These defaults can be modified at every level. To set a default character set at server level, define the settings at startup using –with-charset and –with-collation options. To modify at database level, see the following example:
CREATE DATABASE mydb CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
To view the character set,
mysql> show create database mydb;
+----------+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Database | Create Database |
+----------+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| mydb | CREATE DATABASE `mydb` /*!40100 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 */ |
+----------+---------------------------------------------------------------+
mysql> show variables like "collation_database";
+--------------------+-----------------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+--------------------+-----------------+
| collation_database | utf8_general_ci |
+--------------------+-----------------+
mysql> show variables like "character_set_database";
+------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+------------------------+-------+
| character_set_database | utf8 |
+------------------------+-------+
To create and view the character set and collation in a table:
mysql> create table mytable (
-> id int(10) not null,
-> name varchar(20) null ) character set utf8 collate utf8_unicode_ci;
mysql> show full columns from mytable;
+-------+-------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+-------+---------------------------------+---------+
| Field | Type | Collation | Null | Key | Default | Extra | Privileges | Comment |
+-------+-------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+-------+---------------------------------+---------+
| id | int(10) | NULL | NO | | NULL | | select,insert,update,references | |
| name | varchar(20) | utf8_unicode_ci | YES | | NULL | | select,insert,update,references | |
+-------+-------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+-------+---------------------------------+---------+