> Localized character sets have a collation sequence associated with
> them. Each set has a default collation. Many sets have more than one,
> since different locales can use the charset but use different characters,
> different upper/lower case pairs, different dictionary orders, etc. That's
> the good news.
>
> The bad news is that the non-default collations use up a lot of bytes in
> indexes. In the case of the unicode set, you can't even get any orderings
> outside of the a-z, A-Z groups.
>
>
> It's a very RDBMS-ish thing to do, to design proxy sorting columns into
> your base entities - even if you're using a DBMS that allows huge
> keys. It's a trick that generators can be very useful for - you can
> allocate a range for each alphabetic character to ensure that there will be
> a "slot" available when it's needed. You index the proxy column instead of
> the character column it represents. There are also sorting devices that you
> can automate - such as Soundexes - to make sorts and searches independent
> of character sets.
>
> With IBO, you can even "appoint" your proxy sorting columns when setting up
> datasets and the components will use them intelligently to speed up
> user-driven searches and reorderings.

Excellent information!

>
>>BTW Helen, do you have an email notification for when your books is
>>ready? I'd be very much interested in reading it.
>
>
> There will be a plume of white smoke when it happens. :-)
>

I will keep an eye on the horizon...!


Lee