Hello Lester,

Friday, March 4, 2005, 11:49:24 AM, you wrote:

> Jim Starkey wrote:

>>>Jim, don't forget the field's default collation, before the session's.
>>>
>> I didn't forget it -- I left it out on purpose. In my mind, collation
>> is a property of data manipulation operation, not the data itself. It
>> may be useful as a default for indexes containing that field, but I
>> don't think it should override the default collation specified by a
>> client. I'm willing to concede that a declaration of case insensitivity
>> expressed as a collating sequence doesn't work well with this model.
>> I'm not happy with that, and I'm going to have to think about it some more.

> The one thing that people seem to forget about is that the DATA does not
> have any order at all, so as long as an index is available with a simple
> primary key then any record can be found. It's only when you want to
> order the data that you need the collation.

Not true. Try case-insensitive and accent-insensitive comparison. Or
even case-insensitive comparison.

If I do a search, i.e.: LASTNAME STARTING WITH 'em', I might want all
the rows where LASTNAME starts with 'E', 'e', and any other accented
'e' or 'E', then followed by 'M' or 'm'. If the table has 10 million
rows and there's only 100 rows that would correspond to that
criteria, I think an index with the proper collation would be
welcomed, so that the data is fetched as fast as possible.

--
Best regards,
Daniel Rail
Senior Software Developer
ACCRA Group Inc. (www.accra.ca)
ACCRA Med Software Inc. (www.filopto.com)