Why is MySQL default colin latin1_swedish_ci?

Question

What is the reason for setting latin1_swedish_ci as the compiled default when other parameters look much more reasonable, like latin1_general_ci or utf8_general_ci ?

Answer 1

The guy who wrote this was the co-head of a Swedish company .

Perhaps for similar reasons, the default Microsoft SQL Server language is us_english.

Answer 2

latin1_swedish_ci is a single-byte character set, unlike utf8_general_ci .

Compared to latin1_general_ci it supports many additional characters used in European languages. Thus, this is the best choice if you do not know which language you will use, if you are limited to using only single-byte character sets.