Re: OCTET_LENGTH is wrong

> > Yes. Consider you have UNICODE database and want to sort by French or
> > whatever LATIN locale.
> >
> >      SELECT * FROM t1 ORDER BY convert(text_column,'LATIN1');
> >
> > would be the only way to accomplish that.
> 
> I don't think so.  The sort order is independent of the character
> encoding, and vice versa.  It must be, because
> 
> 1) One language can be represented in different encodings and should
> obviously still sort the same.
> 
> 2) One encoding can serve for plenty of languages, which all sort
> differently.

I assume you are talking about the concept of SQL92/99's COLLATE
syntax.  But I just talked about what we could do in 7.2 which
apprarently does not have the SQL92's COLLATE syntax.

BTW,

> I don't think so.  The sort order is independent of the character
> encoding, and vice versa.  It must be, because

This seems different from SQL's CREATE COLLATION syntax.
From SQL99's CREATE COLLATION definition:
             CREATE COLLATION <collation name> FOR             <character set specification>               FROM
<existingcollation name>                 [ <pad characteristic> ]
 

So it seems a collation depends on a character set.
--
Tatsuo Ishii