Re: [Firebird-devel] Case-insensitive collations

[Alexandre B. S. <ib...@th...>]

Hi Peter,

Peter Jacobi wrote:

>Hi Alexandre,
>
>But adding a nocase/naccent collation is simple. If it is such important 
>commercially, why hasn't one of the commercial vendors added it 
>for their own use as a competitive advantage? Isn't capitalism working
>in this case?
>
>It's straightforward C code. It's documented. Samples exist.
>
>  
>
Paulo Henrique Albanez already did it. And make it available for 
everyone, as source code or binary format.

>And I hope you are not offended by my sometimes sarcastic postings.
>  
>
As I said, I have no control of English, so, your sarcastic comments 
don't offend me, perhaps I have even not noticed then ;-)

>I do understand now what you want, but I'm still perplexed about the
>situation. In my eyes, a mixture of all-uppercase and mixed case, accented
>and pure ASCII variants in the database sounds like a data integrity 
>nightmare and not as an improvement over all ASCII uppercase.
>  
>
ok... I will try to explain again...

The ideal situation is to the data be in the "correct format", the 
correct format is Proper Case and with the correct accent used.

Why the users don't use the correct format ?
1.) Because they are lazy and think that is easy to type if they just 
press the caps lock key, and just type, instead of press sometimes the 
shift key
2.) Because they just mistyped the word
3.) Because they forget (or don't know) how to write correctly a word 
(they are a bunch of rules to determine if a word should/shouldn't  be 
with accent in Portuguese)
4.) Part of the data was imported from an old system that only allows 
upper case/ascii chars.
5.) Data exchange between other systems (even old COBOL systems) where 
just ASCII/upper case are allowed

The problem is one should correct when find a word mistyped, or as the 
system was being used, will converting the ALL CAPS to Mixed Case, but 
is hard to tell someone to correct every record on the legacy records so 
he can be sure he can find the records. So to make the data consistent, 
or you comvert all your old records, or continue to use only ALL CAPS 
ASCII, wich is very ugly.

The goal is when searching for customer names one could just type
Viação Jaraguá
or
Viacao Jaragua
or
VIACAO JARAGUA
or
VIAÇÃO JARAGUÁ

and any of the above forms find the possible variations

Will be more user friendly if the user forgets some accent when search 
for the record and the "system" is "smart enough" to find the accented 
version of the same word and vice-versa. If the system returns "no 
record found", the user will do one of these two things:
1.) He is a smart user, and will check if he typed correctly, and will 
notice that he missed an accent, he will correct the word and search again.
2.) He will assume that there is no record and will try to insert that 
record on the next steps they will be blocked by some database unique 
constraints. So they will think, "why the system did not know that I 
just forgot an accent ????"

Did you get the picture now ?

>Regards,
>Peter Jacobi
>
>  
>
See you !

-- 

Alexandre Benson Smith
Development
THOR Software e Comercial Ltda.
Santo Andre - Sao Paulo - Brazil
www.thorsoftware.com.br