On 8/14/08, Monty Taylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hey all, > > Similar to the charsets conversation, we were also talking about > collations. Currently, of course, we do these per-column, with defaults > available per table and per schema. How useful is this really? What are > people doing who are supporting multi-languages in their systems. Are > they _actually_ storing the multi-language data in different columns > with different collations? > > On the other hand, if there was a per-server collation set by locale, > would that be sufficient?
I don't think so. There are plenty of web apps that have to deal with multiple languages. I think per-column is overkill, but I think having a per-server default and being able to change it per-table is enough. per-database seems like a nicety but completely unnecessary -- the concept of a "database" in MySQL/Drizzle is really "folder"....there are some namespace issues like foreign keys, but pretty much the concept of "database" is very small (as opposed to having different tablespaces and such per database). I'm asking for two reasons. One, targeting the cloud rather than the > enterprise, I'm wondering how many people are wanting their database to > handle multi-language sorting directly. The second is that in the quest > to remove our internally implemented charset/collation situation, the > other libs that do this don't seem to have a good way to do per-method > collation picking. So if we don't actually need to have the collation > switch during the lifetime of the process, we can use system locale > processing. If we _do_ there are other, less attractive options... > although we'll do what we have to do I suppose. The problem isn't multi-language *sorting* but multi-language support. I believe each charset needs at least 1 collation, and in that case, collations need to be settable like charsets -- which I'd say per-server default + per-table to change the default is fine. I believe this would still require client-settable session charset+collation, though I'd say unless specifically overriden the client should read the server default (which seems odd, because you have to connect to the db first....etc). But my brain is odd at times too...... -Sheeri
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