Re: Unicode and Linguistic Sort ?

Yass,

Thanks for your quick response. It took me a while to digest all that information, as you can imagine.

Unfortunately it did not address my earlier question though, as that dealt with the ability to order information in an NLS specific way.

If for example you have a table with country names, and that table includes both Österreich and Zimbabwe, using nls_sort should affect the order in which results are returned as follows:

If I used 'alter session set nls_sort = german;' and then retrieved the countries ordered by name, I would get Österreich followed by Zimbabwe.

If I used 'alter session set nls_sort = swedish;' and ran the same query, I would get Zimbabwe followed by Österreich.

My question relates to the fact that this behaviour does not work in Oracle 7.3.4 when using Unicode (AL24UTFFSS) as the database character set. In this case I would always get Zimbabwe followed by Österreich, as the ordering is always done using a binary sort - using the numeric code assigned to the characters - and the 'Ö' has a higher number than the 'Z' in Unicode.

As I think that this sorting behaviour may be implemented via dynamically loaded translation tables inside the database server, I was wondering if there is a patch available for 7.3.4 that would enable this nls_sort dependant ordering, by adding the required translation tables.

The alternative would be to upgrade to Oracle 8, where nls_sort specific ordering is implemented for the Unicode character set.

Regards,

Jan Mosselman Received on Tue Nov 09 1999 - 11:44:45 CST