MySQL Bugs: #7786: Um, German/French/Italian UTF-8 collations?

Bug #7786	Um, German/French/Italian UTF-8 collations?
Submitted:	10 Jan 2005 23:34	Modified:	12 Jan 2005 18:55
Reporter:	Ryan Schmidt	Email Updates:
Status:	Not a Bug	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Server	Severity:	S3 (Non-critical)
Version:	4.1.8	OS:	N/A
Assigned to:		CPU Architecture:	Any

Description:
Hi. Sorry to bug you, and sorry if this has been discussed before. I couldn't find a relevant similar
bug, and the documentation doesn't seem to address it.

Our company develops a CRM system used by a customer with locations across Europe. Along
with the host of latin1 countries they've already launched, they now want to roll this product out
to their latin2 locations, including Poland, the Check Republic and Slovakia. Thanks to MySQL 4.1,
we can convert the database from latin1 to utf8 and should be able to handle this. Since a user in
any country might conceivably see a list of names and addresses from multiple countries, using
either latin1 or latin2 for the connection charset won't be sufficient, so we intend to use utf8 for
that as well. We're confused however about how to handle sorting, since there don't appear to be
any German, French or Italian collations for utf8. My boss and I spent some time today, figuring
out where the existing utf8 collations are defined in the MySQL source, reading up on the Unicode
collation algorithm, trying to divine how to specify the rules necessary to do German sorting, but
after about an hour of this we were both pretty ready for a beer, and sure that we weren't the
only ones scratching our heads, so we thought we should ask you: Why are there no German /
Italian / French collations for utf8? Is it because one of the other existing utf8 collations would do
the same thing? Or is it because nobody's gotten around to it yet? We searched Google to try to
find others working on these collation definitions, but without success. Thanks for any help you
can offer.

How to repeat:
N/A

Suggested fix:
N/A

This is a feature request, and we shall label it as one.

We simply did not find time to do it yet, but we shall be doing it.

If you would volunteer to add some of those, we would be truly gratefull.

you can use convert to latin2 collation in order by to get the sorting order you want

Could be the reason why there is no separate german collation for unicode:

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=19567