Re: OCTET_LENGTH is wrong

Tatsuo Ishii <t-ishii@sra.co.jp> writes:
> 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.

That in itself would not get the job done; how is the sort operator
to know what collation order you want?

The SQL92 spec suggests that the syntax should be
... ORDER BY text_column COLLATE French;

(note collation names are not standardized AFAICT).  Seems to me it
should then be the system's responsibility to make this happen,
including any encoding conversion that might be needed before the
comparisons could be done.
        regards, tom lane