Character Sets and Collations in MySQL But what if we want to say that the lowercase and uppercase letters are equivalent? Then we would have at least two rules: (1) treat the lowercase letters  a  and  b  as equivalent to  A  and  B ; (2) then compare the encodings. We call this a  case-insensitive  collation. It is a little more complex than a binary collation. In real life, most character sets have many characters: not just  A  and  B  but whole alphabets, sometimes multiple alphabets or eastern writing systems with thousands of characters, along with many special symbols and punctuation marks. Also in real life, most collations have many rules, not just for whether to distinguish lettercase, but also for whether to distinguish accents (an “accent”  is a mark attached to a character as in German  Ö ), and for multiple-character mappings (such as the rule that  Ö  =  OE  in one of the two German collations). MySQL can do these things for you: To use these features effectively, you must know what character sets and collations are available, how to change the defaults, and how they affect the behavior of string operators and functions. MySQL Server supports multiple character sets, including several Unicode character sets. To display the available character sets, use the  INFORMATION_SCHEMA CHARACTER_SETS  table or the  SHOW CHARACTER SET  statement. A partial listing follows. For more complete information, see Section 10.10, “Supported Character Sets and Collations” . By default, the  SHOW CHARACTER SET  statement displays all available character sets. It takes an optional LIKE  or  WHERE  clause that indicates which character set names to match. The following example shows some of the Unicode character sets (those based on Unicode Transformation Format): 1927 •Store strings using a variety of character sets. •Compare strings using a variety of collations. •Mix strings with different character sets or collations in the same server, the same database, or even the same table. •Enable specification of character set and collation at any level. 10.2 Character Sets and Collations in MySQL mysql>  SHOW CHARACTER SET; +----------+---------------------------------+---------------------+--------+ | Charset | Description | Default collation | Maxlen | +----------+---------------------------------+---------------------+--------+ | big5 | Big5 Traditional Chinese | big5_chinese_ci | 2 | | binary | Binary pseudo charset | binary | 1 | ... | latin1 | cp1252 West European | latin1_swedish_ci | 1 | ... | ucs2 | UCS-2 Unicode | ucs2_general_ci | 2 | ... | utf8 | UTF-8 Unicode | utf8_general_ci | 3 | | utf8mb4 | UTF-8 Unicode | utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci | 4 | ... mysql>  SHOW CHARACTER SET LIKE ’utf%’; +---------+------------------+--------------------+--------+ | Charset | Description | Default collation | Maxlen | +---------+------------------+--------------------+--------+ | utf16 | UTF-16 Unicode | utf16_general_ci | 4 | | utf16le | UTF-16LE Unicode | utf16le_general_ci | 4 | | utf32 | UTF-32 Unicode | utf32_general_ci | 4 | | utf8 | UTF-8 Unicode | utf8_general_ci | 3 | | utf8mb4 | UTF-8 Unicode | utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci | 4 | +---------+------------------+--------------------+--------+