KDb/Database Collation Issues

Introduction

Types

Collation type is a rule used when comparing (or sorting) text strings in a database. Lets assume we have three database records in a name column of a table:

 Joe
 Adam
 joan

NOCASE collation means that a comparison like name > "adam" will return:

 Joe
 Adam
 joan

In other words, case-insensitive comparison is performed.

BINARY collation means that a comparison like name > "adam" will return:

 joan

Case-sensitive comparison is performed here, so neither "Joe" nor "Adam" are greater than "adam".

Affected SQL Operators

Following SQL comparison operators are affected:

 < > <= >= <> != = == LIKE.

Implications For Data Integrity

Example for MySQL:

 CREATE TABLE dictionary (
  word varchar(255) COLLATE latin2_bin NOT NULL,
 );
 ALTER TABLE dictionary ADD UNIQUE INDEX (word);

Having BINARY collation latin2_bin defined now it's possible to insert

 Bag
 bag

while, with NOCASE collation, the unique index would not allow this.

Problem with Non-latin1 Character Sets

Database backend needs to offer built-in support for Non-latin1 character collations. Kexi could not implement a workaround at the client side if a query has to be executed at the server side.

Collation in SQLite Backend

SQLite supports BINARY collation by default.

Non-latin1 Character Sets: we can patch SQLite to add such a support. See User-defined Collation Sequences.

Collation in MySQL Backend

By default, MySQL searches are not case sensitive.

See [1] and [2]

To force BINARY collation, we will add a COLLATE clause, e.g.:

 SELECT * FROM table WHERE name>='abc' COLLATE latin1_bin

Notes: latin1_bin collation name always works. Collation and character sets can be properly selected on db creation or connecting only for MySQL >= 4.1. See also Table Character Set and Collation (mysql manual). So for newer MySQL versions use specific collations, not just latin1_bin.

A good default for collation/character set seems to be utf8_general_ci/utf8.

TODO

Collation in PostgreSQL Backend

TODO

Implications for Query Designer

A good default is a #1 priority here. In most cases users expect NOCASE collation to be the default, so we're:

adding NOCASE flag to appropriate KDbBinaryExpr objects when SQL statement is generated/anaysed
supporting BINARY keyword in the Design View of the Query Designer

Competition

MS Access does not support case-sensitive queries.