Introduction To Linguistic Indexes – Part I January 3,
2008Posted by Richard Foote in Index Access Path, Indexing
Tricks, Linguistic Indexes, Oracle Indexes. Characters are
sorted by default based on numeric values defined by the default
character encoding scheme (known as Binary Sorting). For us
Australians, this is fine as we (generally) speak English and
the English alphabet is nicely sorted in ascending order by
ASCII and EBCDIC standards. However, many other languages are
not so fortunate as the binary sort does not sort the data in
many language’s alphabetic sort order. Oracle has many
Globalization Support features to help users in other languages
get over these issues (all very interesting and topics for many
a Blog entry in the future). However, even us Australians have
issues when it comes to “case-insensitive” searches, where data
may be stored in many different cases (eg. Ziggy, ZIGGY, ZiGgY,
etc.) and we want to return all data that matches a character
value, regardless of its case. The issue of