> > Yes. Consider you have UNICODE database and want to sort by French or
> > whatever LATIN locale.
> >
> > SELECT * FROM t1 ORDER BY convert(text_column,'LATIN1');
> >
> > would be the only way to accomplish that.
>
> I don't think so. The sort order is independent of the character
> encoding, and vice versa. It must be, because
>
> 1) One language can be represented in different encodings and should
> obviously still sort the same.
>
> 2) One encoding can serve for plenty of languages, which all sort
> differently.
I assume you are talking about the concept of SQL92/99's COLLATE
syntax. But I just talked about what we could do in 7.2 which
apprarently does not have the SQL92's COLLATE syntax.
BTW,
> I don't think so. The sort order is independent of the character
> encoding, and vice versa. It must be, because
This seems different from SQL's CREATE COLLATION syntax.
From SQL99's CREATE COLLATION definition:
CREATE COLLATION <collation name> FOR <character set specification> FROM
<existingcollation name> [ <pad characteristic> ]
So it seems a collation depends on a character set.
--
Tatsuo Ishii