Collation controls how characters are compared. For example, is 'A' and 'a' considered equal? If not, which one should be ordered first? What about an accented 'a'? A case-insensitive collation (denoted by 'ci') would consider them equal, while a binary collation (denoted by 'bin') or case-sensitive collation (denoted by 'cs') would not.

So the answer to your question is that it really depends on your specific application. You may want to reference chapter 10 of the MySQL manual [dev.mysql.com ] to better understand collation and how to take advantage of it. Otherwise, there's not much to say without knowing what you intend to do.