SQL
Collations
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Collations provide rules for how text should be sorted or compared in the execution engine. Collations are useful for localization, as the rules for how text should be ordered are different for different languages or for different countries. These orderings are often incompatible with one another. For example, in English the letter `y` comes between `x` and `z`. However, in Lithuanian the letter `y` comes between the `i` and `j`. For that reason, different collations are supported. The user must choose which collation they want to use when performing sorting and comparison operations.  
By default, the `BINARY` collation is used. That means that strings are ordered and compared based only on their binary contents. This makes sense for standard ASCII characters (i.e., the letters A-Z and numbers 0-9), but generally does not make much sense for special unicode characters. It is, however, by far the fastest method of performing ordering and comparisons. Hence it is recommended to stick with the `BINARY` collation unless required otherwise.  
> **Warning.  ** Collation support in DuckDB has [some known limitations](https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+collation+) and has [several planned improvements](https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/issues/604).