Expect to come across this popular question in MYSQL questions for interview.   A character set is a set of symbols and encodings. A collation is a set of rules for comparing characters in a character set To display the available character sets run the below query: >SHOW CHARACTER SET; MySQL is capable of doing these things  Store strings using a variety of character sets. Compare strings using a variety of collations. Mix strings with different character sets or collations in the same server, the same database, or even the same table. Enable specification of character set and collation at any level. Latin1 is the default character set in MySQL.