Multilingual Linguistic Sorts

TimesTen provides multilingual linguistic sorts so that you can sort data for multiple languages in one sort.

Multilingual linguistic sort is based on the ISO/OEC 14651 - International String Ordering and the Unicode Collation algorithm standards. This framework enables the database to handle languages that have complex sorting rules, such as those in Asian languages, as well as providing linguistic support for databases with multilingual data.

In addition, multilingual sorts can handle canonical equivalence and supplementary characters. Canonical equivalence is a basic equivalence between characters or sequences of characters. For example, ç is equivalent to the combination of c and ,.

For example, TimesTen supports a monolingual French sort (FRENCH), but you can specify a multilingual French sort (FRENCH_M). _M represents the ISO 14651 standard for multilingual sorting. The sorting order is based on the GENERIC_M sorting order and can sort accents from right to left. TimesTen recommends using a multilingual linguistic sort if the tables contain multilingual data. If the tables contain only French, then a monolingual French sort may have better performance because it uses less memory. It uses less memory because fewer characters are defined in a monolingual French sort than in a multilingual French sort. There is a trade-off between the scope and the performance of a sort.

For a list of supported multilingual sorts, see NLS_SORT in the Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Reference.