Suppose you have a column (COL1) that contains the values ABC, ABZ, BCD and
ÄBC in the ISO 8859/1 8-bit character set. Suppose also, that you wrote
the following query:
SELECT COL1 FROM TAB1 WHERE COL1 > 'B'
The query would return both BCD and ÄBC since Ä has a higher numeric
value than B.
You can perform linguistic comparisons using NLSSORT in the WHERE clause, as
follows:
WHERE NLSSORT(column) operator NLSSORT(string)
Notice that NLSSORT has to be used on both sides of the comparison operator.
SELECT COL1 FROM TAB1 WHERE NLSSORT(COL1) > NLSSORT('B')
If a German linguistic sort is being used, this will not return strings beginning with Ä, because Ä comes before B in the German alphabet. If a Swedish linguistic sort is being used, those strings would be returned, because Ä comes after Z in the Swedish alphabet.