title: Multiple collations for the same MariaDB column?
body: <p>How to perform ORDER BY for string columns efficiently, when different collations are required, depending on the culture? That is, data for the users from different cultures are stored in the same table and the same column, but each user naturally wants to see it ordered according to it's locale (locale is of course known and fixed per each row in the table). And table can be very long, so column needs and index and can't be post-processed on the application side to the desired collation (it's database task to do heavy-lifting, right?).</p>
  
  <p>For example, the <code>utf8_general_ci</code> produces different results from <code>utf8_swedish_ci</code>.</p>
  
  <p>While I think the problem should be evident for any international project, I can't find any suitable solutions out there. Myself I can imaging only the following solutions, which are not that nice and I doubt nothing better can be done:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Use a separate field for each collation</li>
  <li>Maybe, a view can be created per culture and indexed accordingly (I have not worked with MariaDB views though, so this is quite theoretical)</li>
  <li>Use a separate "surrogate" field just for collation, maybe VIRTUAL</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Now, if there were only one sortable string column, but there may be several. What is the intended and right way to solve this?</p>