Leon,
At 07:48 AM 11/03/2003 +0000, you wrote:

>One question about COLLATE. Is it not possible to define the
>collation order once in stead of setting it for every separate table ?

Actually, you set collation order at column level. There is a default
collation order associated with each characterset so, if you don't define a
collation order for a particular character column, the default one will be
used (i.e. the one having the same name as the charset).

You can specify a different collation order for any character column when
inserting, updating or selecting it.

AFAIK, there isn't a way to override the default collation order at
database level...

heLen