What are some best practices for designing and documenting your database collation strategy?

1 Understand your data requirements

Before you choose a collation for your database, you need to understand your data requirements. What languages and scripts do you need to support? What are the common conventions and preferences of your users and customers? How do you handle special characters, punctuation, and whitespace? How do you deal with case sensitivity and accent sensitivity? How do you handle sorting and filtering of text values? These questions will help you determine the level of linguistic and cultural support that your database collation should provide.

2 Choose a standard and consistent collation

Once you have identified your data requirements, you need to choose a standard and consistent collation for your database. A standard collation is one that follows a widely accepted specification, such as Unicode or ISO 14651. A consistent collation is one that applies the same rules across all tables, columns, and indexes in your database. Using a standard and consistent collation can help you avoid errors, conflicts, and data loss when you transfer, query, or join data from different sources. It can also make your database more portable, scalable, and interoperable with other systems.

3 Document your collation choice and rationale

After you have selected a standard and consistent collation for your database, it is important to document your collation choice and rationale. This will help communicate and justify your design decisions to stakeholders, developers, and users, as well as assist in maintaining and updating your database collation strategy in the future. Your documentation should include the name and version of the collation used, the languages and scripts supported and how it handles them, advantages and disadvantages compared to other options, scenarios and use cases covered and performance, and any limitations or challenges posed. Additionally, it should provide insight into how to overcome these challenges.

4 Test and validate your collation

Before you deploy your database collation strategy, you need to test and validate it to ensure it works as expected and meets your data requirements. Testing and validating your collation should involve using sample data that reflects the complexity of your real data, running queries and operations that simulate common tasks and functions of your database, employing tools and methods to measure and compare the performance and accuracy of your collation, and gathering feedback from users and customers to evaluate usability and satisfaction.

5 Review and update your collation

After you deploy your database collation strategy, it is important to review and update your collation. This will ensure that your collation remains up to date and relevant to your changing data needs. You should review and update your collation when new data is added, modified, or deleted; when you upgrade, migrate, or integrate with other systems; when you need to support new languages, scripts, or formats; or when new standards, specifications, or best practices for collation are received.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?