Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
I think that if SQL COLLATE gets in we'll get this almost for free. Collation and charset are both properties of strings. Once you've got a mechanism to know the collation of a string, you just attach the charset to the same place. The only difference is that changing charsets requires recoding, wheres changing collation does not.
Not quite. Collation is a property of the operation that you're doing. For example, if you're doing a sort, you might do it in different collation depending on the user that's doing it, or it might even be chosen by the user case-by-case. Of course, usually you have a default set per-database, per-table or per-column, but it's not a property of the actual value of a field. I think that the phrase "collation of a string" doesn't make sense.
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