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10.8.1 Using COLLATE in SQL Statements

With the COLLATE clause, you can override whatever the default collation is for a comparison. COLLATE may be used in various parts of SQL statements. Here are some examples:

With ORDER BY:

SELECT k
FROM t1
ORDER BY k COLLATE latin1_german2_ci;

With AS:

SELECT k COLLATE latin1_german2_ci AS k1
FROM t1
ORDER BY k1;

With GROUP BY:

SELECT k
FROM t1
GROUP BY k COLLATE latin1_german2_ci;

With aggregate functions:

SELECT MAX(k COLLATE latin1_german2_ci)
FROM t1;

With DISTINCT:

SELECT DISTINCT k COLLATE latin1_german2_ci
FROM t1;

With WHERE:

     SELECT *
     FROM t1
     WHERE _latin1 'Müller' COLLATE latin1_german2_ci = k;

     SELECT *
     FROM t1
     WHERE k LIKE _latin1 'Müller' COLLATE latin1_german2_ci;

With HAVING:

SELECT k
FROM t1
GROUP BY k
HAVING k = _latin1 'Müller' COLLATE latin1_german2_ci;

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User Comments

User comments in this section are, as the name implies, provided by MySQL users. The MySQL documentation team is not responsible for, nor do they endorse, any of the information provided here.

Posted by Meffy Ellis on September 6, 2015

Without "COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci", running the following queries together in MySQL Workbench resulted in the error shown below.

SET @MyStyle = 'SHIRT12345';
SELECT [...] WHERE Style = @MyStyle blah blah;

Error Code: 1267. Illegal mix of collations (utf8_unicode_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,IMPLICIT) for operation '='

Adding "COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci" as shown below forced the variable's collation to be the same one I'm using in the database, and the query ran successfully.

SET @MyStyle = 'SHIRT12345' COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
SELECT [...] WHERE Style = @MyStyle blah blah;