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Global Deployment Guide > Supported Character Sets and Collation > Collation of the Local and Sample DatabaseCollation 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. 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. |
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