Hi Ken,--On November 16, 2006 9:56:29 AM -0500 Ken Murchison <murch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
So, SORT/THREAD use a minimum of two collations, and upto three in the case of ORDEREDSUBJECT. The question is whether these will ever need to be specified separately. I think it may be prudent to at least define two COMPARATORs, not one. One would be the active collation for comparisons, the other the active collation for ordering operations.I can see arguments for using one collation throughout, or having two separate collations. I don't have a string opinion either way. Cyrus, do you have a suggestion for how a second comparator would be selected? Would this be an addition to COMPARATOR or an addition to SORT/THREAD?
Well, are there other places where we might do sorting? One possibility might have been LIST-EXTENDED, but as we know LIST responses are not ordered. I know at some point there had been discussion of a sort order preserving COPY operation.
If we want to have separate collations for these steps then I think adding a parameter to SORT/THREAD would be better. Note that METADATA is going to do that for the METADATA select option in LIST-EXTENDED. However, there needs to be a convincing argument for this.
All I can come up with is: I might want SEARCH on Priority using i;ascii-numeric as the active collation, but that would be inappropriate for the ordering or grouping operations in either SORT or THREAD.
-- Cyrus Daboo