A collation describes how to sort and compare characters from a particular character set or encoding. SQL Anywhere supports two collation algorithms: the SQL Anywhere Collation Algorithm (SACA), and the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA). SACA provides fast, compact, and reasonable sorting at the expense of linguistic correctness. UCA provides linguistic correctness, but with a small expense in storage requirements and execution time.

This section describes the supplied collations, and provides suggestions as to which collations to use under certain circumstances.

For more information about how to create a database with a specific collation, see Creating a database with a named collation and Initialization utility (dbinit).

For information about customization of the UCA collation using collation tailoring syntax, see Collation tailoring options.