""didiergm"" <Didiergm@...> wrote in message
news:a0329j+5rh5@......

>
> Sorry I did not answered earlier, I was away for a couple of days=20
> (pre-xmas holidays :-)). Anyway, the Unicode FSS seems to be a quite=20
> laborious way. I also forgot to mention that my app must be able to=20
> run on some other DB engines (namely Sybase & Oracle).=20
> If I have to prefix all fields with '_UNICODE_FSS:' then the new=20
> issue is that I will have to maintain a completely separate set of=20
> Sql code for firebird (aaarrrgh).=20

The charset is a global setting. Once you declare it when creating the db,
it has effect on all string fields, unless you override it explicitly.
The collation is not a global setting. It means you have to declare it for
each field. The problem is that for every charset, the default collation is
the binary one, not the dictionary-sorted one, so most probably you will
want to change it. You can alter system tables to make another collation the
charset inside a collation, but it won't survive a backup restore IMHO.
Now, UNICODE is a surprise. It has only a binary collation, hence it may or
it may not be what you want. If you only need to support Western alphabets,
prefer ISO8859_1 as it has collations for a couple of languages.

Most collations are case-sensitive by default (there are a few exceptions).
At www.brookstonesystems.com you will find case-insensitive collations.

C.
--
Claudio Valderrama C. - http://www.cvalde.com - http://www.firebirdSql.org
Independent developer
Owner of the Interbase® WebRing