Sorting non-English names with MySQL

Question

I am trying to sort a table that contains Greek characters. The corresponding English version of the table is being sorted (both ASC and DESC) just fine, every time you click on the header of the table.

I have searched on Greek forums and the only solution suggested is to use ORDER BY BINARY. In fact, many people said that the use of binary order solved their problem. Unfortunately, it doesn't in my case. I know that the same problem exists in with languages like German where the use of umlauts messes the order and in general in languages with special caracters. If someone has any idea how to overcome this problem i would be grateful.

Answer 1

According to a thread on forums.mysql.com, in MySQL 6.0, you can sort Greek names if the charset of your table is set to utf8_general_ci.

create table t (s1 char(1) character set utf8 collate utf8_general_ci); 
insert into t values ('Α'),('Β'),('Γ'),('Δ'),('Ε'),('Ζ');
select * from t order by s1;

The above should return

+----+ 
| s1 | 
+----+ 
| Α  | 
| Β  | 
| Γ  | 
| Δ  | 
| Ε  | 
| Ζ  |
+----+