The database needs to accommodate a variety of languages and characters to support different character sets (Character set), and each character set has its own collation (Collation).
One. Character Set
Character set, which is a collection of encodings used to define characters in a database. Common character sets: Utf-8 GBK and so on.
Two. Sorting rules
Collations in the database are used to define a rule in which characters are sorted and compared. The following are common:
(1) Utf8_general_cs and utf8_general_ci (suffix "_cs" or "_ci" mean case-sensitive and case-insensitive (box sensitive & Case insensitve))
(2) Utf8_bin specifies that each string is stored in binary encoding, case sensitive, and can store binary content directly
Description: A collation that refers to whether a character comparison is case-sensitive and is compared by character encoding or directly using binary data.
See also:
Http://www.cnblogs.com/tlz888/p/7067835.html
Description of the character set and collation in MySQL