Available sort orders

The sort order determines the collating sequence the Cluster Edition uses to order, compare, and index character data. Each character set comes with one or more sort orders.

Sort orders are located in sort order definition files (.srt files) that accompany your character set definition files.

Available sort orders vary according to the character set installed on the Cluster Edition.

You can see the available sort orders for your character set by looking in the .srt file for your language. Sort orders are stored in:

$SYBASE/charsets/<charset_name>/*.srt

Table 17-16 describes available sort orders.

**Table 17-16: Sort orders available in the Cluster Edition**
Sort order name	Description
Binary order	Sorts all data according to numeric byte values for that character set. Binary order sorts all ASCII uppercase letters before lowercase letters. Accented or ideographic (multibyte) characters sort in their respective standards order, which may be arbitrary. All character sets have binary order as the default. If binary order does not meet your needs, you can specify one of the other sort orders either at installation or at a later time by, using the charset utility.
Dictionary order, case sensitive, accent sensitive	Case sensitive. Sorts each uppercase letter before its lowercase counterpart, including accented characters. Recognizes the various accented forms of a letter and sorts them after the associated unaccented letter.
Dictionary order, case insensitive, accent sensitive	Case-insensitive dictionary sort order. Uppercase letters are equivalent to their lowercase counterparts and are intermingled in sorting results.
Dictionary order, case insensitive, accent insensitive	Case-insensitive dictionary sort order. Diacritical marks are ignored.
Dictionary order, case insensitive with preference	Case-insensitive dictionary sort order, with case preference for collating purposes. A word written with uppercase letters is equivalent to the same word written with lowercase letters. Uppercase and lowercase letters are distinguished only when you use an order by clause. The order by clause sorts uppercase letters before it sorts lowercase. Do not select this sort order unless your installation requires that uppercase letters be sorted before lowercase letters in otherwise equivalent strings for order by clauses. Using this sort order may reduce performance in large tables when the columns specified in an order by clause match the key of the table’s clustered index.
Alternate dictionary order, case sensitive	Case-sensitive alternate dictionary sort order with lowercase variants sorted before uppercase. Use with several of the Western European languages.
Alternate dictionary order, case insensitive, accent insensitive	Case-insensitive and accent-insensitive alternate dictionary sort order. Use with several of the Western European languages.
Alternate dictionary order, case insensitive, uppercase preference	Case-insensitive alternate dictionary sort order with uppercase preference. Use with several of the Western European languages.
Spanish dictionary order, case sensitive	Case-sensitive Spanish dictionary sort order. Use with Spanish and for most Latin American locales.
Spanish dictionary order, case insensitive	Spanish case-insensitive dictionary sort order. Use with Spanish and for most Latin American locales.
Spanish dictionary order case insensitive, accent insensitive	Spanish case-insensitive and accent-insensitive dictionary sort order. Use with Spanish and for most Latin American locales.
Scandinavian dictionary order, case sensitive	Case-sensitive dictionary sort order. Use with Scandinavian languages.
Scandinavian dictionary order, case insensitive, uppercase preference	Case-insensitive and accent-insensitive dictionary sorting, with uppercase preference. Use with Scandinavian languages.

To see the sort orders that are available, use the charset utility to display the sort orders for the character sets you plan to use. For mo7re information on unicode sort orders for UTF-8, see “Configuring Character Sets, Sort Orders, and Languages” in the System Administration Guide.

Table 17-17 lists the available default Unicode sort orders.

**Table 17-17: Default Unicode sort orders**
Name	ID	Description
defaultml	20	Default Unicode multi-lingual ordering
thaidict	21	Thai dictionary ordering
iso14651	22	Ordering as per ISO14651 standard
utf8bin	24	Ordering for UTF-16 that matches the UTF-8 binary
binary	25	Binary sort
altnoacc	39	Alternate accent-insensitive
altdict	45	Alternate dictionary ordering
altnocsp	46	Alternate case-insensitive with preference
scandict	47	Scandinavian dictionary ordering
scannocp	48	Scandinavian case-insensitive with preference
bin_utf8	50	UTF-8 binary sort order
dict	51	General-purpose dictionary ordering
nocase	52	General-purpose case-insensitive dictionary ordering
nocasep	53	General-purpose case-insensitive with preference
noaccent	54	General-purpose accent-insensitive dictionary ordering
espdict	55	Spanish dictionary ordering
espnocs	56	Spanish case-insensitive dictionary ordering
espnoac	57	Spanish accent-insinuative dictionary ordering
rusnocs	59	Russian case-insensitive dictionary ordering
cyrnocs	64	Cyrillic case-insensitive dictionary ordering
elldict	65	Greek dictionary ordering
hundict	69	Hungarian dictionary ordering
hunnoac	70	Hungarian accent-insensitive dictionary ordering
hunnocs	71	Hungarian case-insensitive dictionary ordering
turknoac	73	Turkish accent-insensitive dictionary ordering
cp932bin	129	CP932 binary sort order
dynix	130	GB pinyin sortorder
gb2312bn	137	GB2312 binary sort order
cyrdict	140	Cyrillic dictionary sort order
turdict	155	Turkish dictionary sort order
euckscbn	161	EUCKSC binary sort order
gbpinyin	163	GB pinyin sort order
rusdict	165	Russian dictionary sort order
sjisbin	179	SJIS binary sort order
eucjisbn	192	EUCJIS binary sort order
big5bin	194	BIG5 binary sort order