14 Jan 2015 Patrycja Dybka Oracle Collations: Binary and Linguistic Collations Oracle bases its language support on the values of parameters that begin with NLS. These parameters specify, for example, how to display currency or how the name of a day is spelled. The table below presents some of the NLS parameters. By using one of them, NLS_SORT, we can specify the sort method (binary or linguistic) for both SQL WHERE clause operations and NLSSORT function operations. Option Name Description NLS_LANG The current language, territory, and database character set, which are determined by session-wide globalization parameters. Read more 5 Jan 2015 Patrycja Dybka PostgreSQL Collations List Collations Collations in PostgreSQL are available depending on operating system support. For example, in Ubuntu type the following to list the names of the available collations: locale -a The same locales are available in PostgreSQL in the pg_collation catalog (mappings from an SQL name to operating system locale categories). select * from pg_collation; collname | collnamespace | collowner | collencoding | collcollate | collctype -----------+---------------+-----------+--------------+-------------+------------ default | 11 | 10 | -1 | | C | 11 | 10 | -1 | C | C POSIX | 11 | 10 | -1 | POSIX | POSIX C. Read more 31 Dec 2014 Agnieszka Kozubek-Krycuń MySQL Collations List Collations To list all collations available in MySQL, use SHOW COLLATION; +-------------------+----------+-----+---------+----------+---------+ | Collation | Charset | Id | Default | Compiled | Sortlen | +-------------------+----------+-----+---------+----------+---------+ | big5_chinese_ci | big5 | 1 | Yes | Yes | 1 | | big5_bin | big5 | 84 | | Yes | 1 | | dec8_swedish_ci | dec8 | 3 | Yes | Yes | 1 | | dec8_bin | dec8 | 69 | | Yes | 1 | | cp850_general_ci | cp850 | 4 | Yes | Yes | 1 | | cp850_bin | cp850 | 80 | | Yes | 1 | | hp8_english_ci | hp8 | 6 | Yes | Yes | 1 | | hp8_bin | hp8 | 72 | | Yes | 1 | | koi8r_general_ci | koi8r | 7 | Yes | Yes | 1 | | koi8r_bin | koi8r | 74 | | Yes | 1 | | latin1_german1_ci | latin1 | 5 | | Yes | 1 | | latin1_swedish_ci | latin1 | 8 | Yes | Yes | 1 | | latin1_danish_ci | latin1 | 15 | | Yes | 1 | | latin1_german2_ci | latin1 | 31 | | Yes | 2 | | latin1_bin | latin1 | 47 | | Yes | 1 | | latin1_general_ci | latin1 | 48 | | Yes | 1 | . Read more 22 Dec 2014 Agnieszka Kozubek-Krycuń How Does a Database Sort Strings? Different languages have different alphabets and different ways to order letters within those alphabets. For example, a Polish character Ł comes right after L and before M. In Swedish, a letter Å comes almost at the end, right after Z. In French diacritics marks have no impact on the alphabetical order, so the letters À, Á and  are treated as the letter A when sorting strings. A collation is a set of rules that defines how to compare and sort character strings. Read more