SQL/MP Reference Manual

HP NonStop SQL/MP Reference Manual—523352-013
C-38
Considerations—Collation Definitions
Considerations—Collation Definitions

Collation limits
A collation can have up to:

500 strings

100 character classes

8192 tokens (keywords, identifiers, punctuation elements, integers, and
strings)

Collations for Pathmaker applications
Collations for Pathmaker-SQL applications must specify the hexadecimal character
ff as the last entry in the collation list.
This requirement exists because Pathmaker generates SQL queries in this format:
SELECT x FROM t WHERE col1 >= :h1
AND col1 <= :h2
where: h1 is a value entered from a screen, and :h2 is the same value padded with
binary 1s.
Such a query depends on binary 1 having the maximum character value (that is,
having the integer value 255 and being positioned last in the order list). An SQL
collation supports this usage only if hexadecimal ff is the final character in the order
list.
Examples—Collation Definitions

This example shows an order list from an LC_COLLATE section that includes a
German a-umlaut and preserves the relative positions of <a> and <e> in the order
of the character collation sequence:
LC_COLLATE
order_start forward
<a>
... ...
<e>
... ...
<z>
\d196 "<a><e>"
order_end
END LC_COLLATE

This example demonstrates the use of ellipsis and the effect of specifying weight
for elements in the order list of an LC_COLLATE section.
The ellipsis in the column on the left specifies all the characters between the letters
B and Z (that is, C through Y). The ellipsis in the column on the right specifies that
all the characters between the letters B and Z collate according to their relative