Hi Rasmus,

"Rasmus Olesen" wrote:

> Reading the IB6 docs, LANGREF.pdf, chap8, p.282, one could also get
> the impression that specifing a diffrent CHARSET is just there to
> allow backward compatibility( and therefore implicitly shouldn't be
> used for new db's)...is it so ?

I disagree with this interpretation. My reading is
- the DB_* collations are provided for dBase compatibility
- the PDOX_* collations are provided for Paradox/DOS compatibility
- the PXW_* collations are provided for Paradox/Win compatibility

Now you compute the set difference and will see that there
are a large number of collations left, naming especially the
<language>_<country> collations for ISO-8859-*

"Rasmus Olesen" wrote:

> When and how should one use these COLLATE orders and specify
> CHARSETs, beyond defaulting to NONE ?
>
> Is it correct to assume that COLLATEs are just there to sort strings
> in the right order(acc. to the collation) ?

All NONE is fine when the character data should be completely
opaque to the DBMS. You neither need nor expect language correct
sorting, upper/lowercasing, handling of accented characters.

Regards,
Peter Jacobi