Re: Sort in DBCS

From: Steve Billings (steveb@workgroup.com)
Date: Thu Apr 18 1996 - 14:41:27 EDT


Smita:

> Can anyone help me understand if it would be a good idea to sort
> Kanji characters in Unicode order, or for that matter what is Unicode
> order? Would this order be culturally sensitive for the language? The
> products in reference are in various Microsoft environments.

I am no authority, but I have heard several times that using
Unicode order for collation is a bad idea (even Unicode says
this).

Apparently the order may be close for one of the Chinese's (traditional
or simplified, I forget which), but even this should not be counted
on.

HOWEVER, I believe that major database vendors like Oracle and Sybase
will "sort" Unicode (actually UTF-8) using Unicode order (ie. they
don't sort!).

My question is: what do do about this? Lots of applications (like
ours) use the underlying databases to sort. Are sorting functions
available? If anyone has a solution, I'd love to hear it. Maybe it
will help Smita also.

Thanks,
Steve Billings

 __________________________________________________________________
                        Steve Billings
                 Product Internationalization
 Workgroup Technology Corp. Email: steveb@workgroup.com
 81 Hartwell Avenue Phone: (617) 674-7615
 Lexington, MA 02173 USA Fax: (617) 674-0034
 __________________________________________________________________



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:30 EDT