Re: [Firebird-devel] Case-insensitive collations

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

Hi Carlos, All,

> Despite the fact that I do not fully understand what you mean with
> 'multi-level collations', 

There is no substitute for leartning. If you want to know about
state-of-the-art collations, there is no substitute for starting here:
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/

Dave has a somewhat gentler introduction in his CollationKit.

> I tend to disagree with you... at last in
> Brazil, people are requesting for a long time an accent/case
> insensitive collation. 

For what use case?

The existing multi level collations already implement nearly everything a 
no-case/no-accent collation can do. Except assuring uniqueness
regarding columns. But I consider it a somewhat strange design, to 
a) not allow more than one of "RED", "Red" and "red" in a column
but 
b) not to care about which spelling is desired

> Almost everyone here comes from the xBase world
> where we had case-insensive indexes and this feature is really missed
> by those users.

Hehe, a lot of users get the answer "No, you don't want to do this" for
some questions on Firebird. This is not exactly good propaganda
for Firebird, even when considered to be educational. So,
whereas I'm somewhat tempted to react like this, ...
 
> Even an unoficial special Firebird binary was created by a brazilian
> guy just to implement a case-insensitive collate called PT_BR. Dave
> was contacted some years ago to develop an official case/accent
> insensitive collation based on WIN1252 and ISO8859_1. Many people here
> contributed with money to pay him for this, but due to lack time (from
> him) the work wasn't done.

Give me the requirements spec. What exact behaviour do you want for this 
collation?

> It seems that FB suffers a collation/charset general mess and I think
> it deserves a good cleanup in this area.

IMHO it suffers from some great design ideas and really wonderful 
generality of approach, but then having stopped development when
everything was 90% ready.
 
> In the results of my "Firebird Users Wish List Survey" running at
> http://infopoll.net/live/surveys/s25748.htm, this feature is among the
> top 4 mostly wanted features. The final results will be published next
> week.

Users don't know how they want to sort ;-)

Regards,
Peter Jacobi