Character Sets and Collations
In MySQL, a character set defines the symbols available for use and a collation defines how those symbols are sorted and compared. For example, the UTF-8 character set can represent the wide array of characters from many languages while a collation like the utf8_general_ci determines how these characters are sorted and compared in a case-insensitive manner.
Introduction to MySQL Character Encoding
Character encoding is a fundamental aspect of any database system including MySQL. It determines how characters are represented internally and how they’re stored and processed by the database. In this article, we’ll explore the concept of character encoding in MySQL its importance, and the common encoding schemes used.