Re: [Firebird-devel] Case-insensitive collations

[Peter J. <pj...@wa...>]

Hi Ivan, All,

> What is the reason that there are still no case/accent/diacritic-insensitive
> built-in collations in Firebird ? Is it that some bugs prevent it, or that
> it is more difficult than I think, or that it could be easy done but
> difficult to ensure that it conforms to some norms, or that this area will
> be completely reworked in FB2 so doing it now would be wasting of time, or
> is the reason as simple as that nobody just created them ?

All of the above and then some.

A) (and very important from my POV):
For the majority of application, no-case no-accent collations don't make 
sense, and the 'normal' multi-level collations would fulfill all 
requirements, if only they are used. As you are mentioning in your parallel 
post, in STARTING WITH and LIKE 'foo%'

STARTING WITH 'ABC' should select 'ABCDE' and 'abcde', when a multilevel 
collation is used.

B) The existing multi-level collations are painfully wasteful on key 
storage space, limiting the maximally indexable buffer size to a third of 
the general limit. For this reasons, triplicating them into no-case and
no-case / no-accent variants is -at least to me- wasted effort.

C) All future collation should better be seen and (partially) implemented 
as restrictions of collations on Unicode, but the Unicode support of FB is 
still lacking.

D) Only with FB1.5.1 it has become an options to consistently use 
connection charset NONE (ane be it only for the lack of a better solution)

E) I am not that productive as I hoped.

F) Implementing Thai was more fun.

G) Doing some serious work on charset/collations always looks somewhat 
wasted, due to the lack feedback - and the possibility that everything will 
be thrown out eventually and linked against ICU.

H) Whoever needs no-case/no-accent very bad, can try my pj_colkit LOADABLE 
collation.
http://www.jodelpeter.de/i18n/fbarch/loadable.txt
http://www.jodelpeter.de/i18n/fbarch/

I) I neither have a MSVC build environment nor a working Linux and never 
managed to get MinGW working.

J) As rdb$collations and rdb$character_sets are hardcoded into the engine's 
code, instead of being deferred from the DLLs, it's unnecessarily 
complicated to add charscter sets and collations (and all tools will ignore 
them)

Regards,
Peter Jacobi