The database collation sequence includes the notion of alphabetic ordering of letters, and extends it to include all characters in the character set, including digits and space characters.
More than one character can be associated with each sort position. This is useful if you wish, for example, to treat an accented character the same as the character without an accent.
Two characters with the same sort position are considered identical in all ways by the database. Therefore, if a collation assigned the characters a and e to the same sort position, then a query with the following search condition:
WHERE col1 = 'want'
is satisfied by a row for which col1 contains the entry went.
At each sort position, lower- and uppercase forms of a character can be indicated. For case-sensitive databases (the default for IQ databases created as of version 12.4.2), the lower- and uppercase characters are not treated as equivalent. For case-insensitive databases, the lower- and uppercase versions of the character are considered equivalent.
Tip
Any code that selects a default collation for a German system
should select 1252LATIN1, not 1252DEU. 1252DEU
differentiates between characters with and without an umlaut, while
1252LATIN1 does not. 1252LATIN1 considers Muller and Müller
equal, but 1252DEU does not consider them equal. Because 1252DEU
views characters with umlauts as separate characters, it has the
following alphabetic ordering: ob, öa.
