Hi adem, All,

In Firebird-Architect@yahoogroups.com, "adem" wrote:

> It seems you all agree that some form of
> Unicode is a good idea for the server and
> the charset issue is best left with the
> client to worry about.

Count me as the disagreeing one. I'd like
better UNICODE support (and I'm trying to
contribute to it), but I'd prefer the
other charsets not to vanish.

> Now, this might be too obvious, but to me it
> seems only a natural extension to let/require
> the client upload whatever the collation order
> it desires to the server.
>
> That way, this collation order headache would
> be completely removed off the server developers
> and would give the code developers quite a bit
> of freedom to pick and choose their own collation
> orders.

This is a sexy idea, but it's not that much work
removed from the server. Nowadays the server gets
the collation info from a DLL, in your proposal
it would read some table in the database. The actual
use of the collation info to calculate keys and compare
strings would be the same.

Also in the current schema the collation designer can
carefully handcraft the collation code to use as few bits
per character in the key as possible. If general
collation info is give at runtime, either the keys will
get longer or some very clever collation compiler
would have to be included in the server.

Regards,
Peter Jacobi