What does collation mean? - sql

Question

What does collation mean in SQL, and what does it do?

Answer 1

Collation can be simply thought of as sort order.
In English (and it's strange cousin, American), collation may be a pretty simple matter consisting of ordering by the ASCII code.
Once you get into those strange European languages with all their accents and other features, collation changes. For example, though the different accented forms of a may exist at disparate code points, they may all need to be sorted as if they were the same letter.

Answer 2

Besides the "accented letters are sorted differently than unaccented ones" in some Western European languages, you must take into account the groups of letters, which sometimes are sorted differently, also.
Traditionally, in Spanish, "ch" was considered a letter in its own right, same with "ll" (both of which represent a single phoneme), so a list would get sorted like this:
caballo
cinco
coche
charco
chocolate
chueco
dado
(...)
lámpara
luego
llanta
lluvia
madera
Notice all the words starting with single c go together, except words starting with ch which go after them, same with ll-starting words which go after all the words starting with a single l. This is the ordering you'll see in old dictionaries and encyclopedias, sometimes even today by very conservative organizations.
The Royal Academy of the Language changed this to make it easier for Spanish to be accomodated in the computing world. Nevertheless, ñ is still considered a different letter than n and goes after it, and before o. So this is a correctly ordered list:
Namibia
número
ñandú
ñú
obra
ojo
By selecting the correct collation, you get all this done for you, automatically :-)

Answer 3

Rules that tell how to compare and sort strings: letters order; whether case matters, whether diacritics matter etc.
For instance, if you want all letters to be different (say, if you store filenames in UNIX), you use UTF8_BIN collation:
SELECT 'A' COLLATE UTF8_BIN = 'a' COLLATE UTF8_BIN
---
0
If you want to ignore case and diacritics differences (say, for a search engine), you use UTF8_GENERAL_CI collation:
SELECT 'A' COLLATE UTF8_GENERAL_CI = 'ä' COLLATE UTF8_GENERAL_CI
---
1
As you can see, this collation (comparison rule) considers capital A and lowecase ä the same letter, ignoring case and diacritic differences.

Answer 4

Collation defines how you sort and compare string values
For example, it defines how to deal with
accents (äàa etc)
case (Aa)
the language context:
In a French collation, cote < côte < coté < côté.
In the SQL Server Latin1 default , cote < coté < côte < côté
ASCII sorts (a binary collation)

Answer 5

Collation means assigning some order to the characters in an Alphabet, say, ASCII or Unicode etc.
Suppose you have 3 characters in your alphabet - {A,B,C}. You can define some example collations for it by assigning integral values to the characters
Example 1 = {A=1,B=2,C=3}
Example 2 = {C=1,B=2,A=3}
Example 3 = {B=1,C=2,A=3}
As a matter of fact, you can define n! collations on an Alphabet of size n. Given such an order, different sorting routines likes LSD/MSD string sorts make use of it for sorting strings.

Answer 6

Collation determines how your data is sorted and compared. It's very often important with regards to internazionalization, e.g. how do you sort japanese kanji?
If you google collation and sql server you'll find plenty of articles discussing it!

Answer 7

Reference is taken from this Article:
A collation is a set of rules for comparing characters in a character set. It has also ruled for sorting of characters and proper order of two characters varies from language to language.
A Collation compared two strings like, if a word is greater than another one, and sort accordingly.
If you are using “latin1” Character set, you can use “latin1_swedish_ci” Collation.
You have to choose right collation because wrong collation may affect your database performance.

Answer 8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation
Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. (...) A collation algorithm such as the Unicode collation algorithm defines an order through the process of comparing two given character strings and deciding which should come before the other.

Answer 9

The collation is how SQL server decides on how to sort and compare text.
See MSDN.