what collation to use?

[David Thielen]

Hi;

We have a portal product we are about to start shipping. Over half of our customers are outside the US including both the middle east and far east. We have a schema.sql file to create the database on their computers.

Should this specify the collation for all text columns as the schema.sql created by MySql (from Sql Server) does (Latin something)? Or should we leave this blank so it uses whatever they have set as the default for their installation of MySql?

Presently have:
CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS `WindwardPortal`
CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci;
USE `WindwardPortal`;
-- -------------------------------------
-- Tables

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `WindwardPortal`.`Report`;
CREATE TABLE `WindwardPortal`.`Report` (
`reportId` INT(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`reportTemplateId` INT(10) NOT NULL,
`rTitle` VARCHAR(500) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL,
...

Switch to(do I get rid of the "character set utf8" part also?):

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS `WindwardPortal`;
USE `WindwardPortal`;
-- -------------------------------------
-- Tables

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `WindwardPortal`.`Report`;
CREATE TABLE `WindwardPortal`.`Report` (
`reportId` INT(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`reportTemplateId` INT(10) NOT NULL,
`rTitle` VARCHAR(500) NOT NULL,