What does collation mean?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.