Global Deployment Guide > Supported Character Sets and Collation >

Collation of the Local and Sample Database

Collation is the ordering relationship, or sequence, among objects. Databases have collation sequences so that items can be sorted into a certain order (such as in alphabetic order for text strings). The ability to define a collation sequence is important because different locales sort characters in different orders.

For example, letters with accents may or may not be sorted with the same unaccented letters. If you have a, ä, and b, the following sort orders are possible, as shown in Table 5.

Table 5.  Example Sort Order With Accented and Unaccented Letters
German
Swedish
a
a
ä
b
b
ä

In the preceding example, German is sorting first by diacritical, and then by character (for example, a is followed by ä, and then b). Swedish, by comparison, is using the ä as its own character, so a is followed by b, and then ä.


 Global Deployment Guide 
 Published: 18 April 2003