The usage of introducer syntax, i.e., prefixing an underscore to a character set name, to force the succeeding text literal to transliterated to that character set, has caused some problems in situations where a single SQL statement entails usage of more than one character set. The actual problems differ from version to version, showing up as transliteration errors, malformed string errors or just as some kind of unexpected behaviour.

Problems could occur in two different usage scenarios.-

To enable a workaround for such problems, it is now possible to transform the literal string into the hex representation of the ASCII characters being submitted by the introducer. For example:

    select _dos850 '123áé456' from rdb$database
      

may be transformed to

    select _dos850 X'313233A082343536' from rdb$database
      

Tracker reference CORE-1600.

Malformed characters are no longer allowed in data for UNICODE_FSS columns.

New restore switches were added to the gbak utility code for the purpose of repairing malformed UNICODE_FSS data and metadata by restoring a backup of the affected database. Details are in the gbak section of the Utilities chapter.

Tracker reference: CORE-1945)

For UNICODE collations only, a custom attribute NUMERIC-SORT has been enabled for specifying the order by which to sort numerals.

Format & Usage

The default, 0, sorts numerals in alphabetical order. For example:

    1
    10
    100
    2
    20
      

1 sorts numerals in numerical order. For example:

    1
    2
    10
    20
    100
      

Example

create collation unicode_num for utf8
from unicode 'NUMERIC-SORT=1';