Working with collations

A collation is an algorithm for ordering strings. When an Actuate SQL query is executed, the collation determines the result of sort and comparison operations, including:

The order of string items produced by the ORDER BY clause

The grouping of string items produced by the GROUP BY clause

The strings returned by SELECT DISTINCT

The result of string comparison operations, for example 'abc' > 'ABC'

The result returned by the MAX and MIN functions when used with strings

The result of the LIKE and POSITION operators

The result returned by the COUNT (DISTINCT) function when used with strings

Databases support one or more collations. The database collation is usually determined by the database locale. The Integration service, however, supports only the Unicode and ASCII code-point collations, which order strings based on the Unicode or ASCII numbers corresponding to each character. Together, the database collation and the Integration service collation determine which operations are sent to the database and which operations must be performed by the Integration service.

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