oracle NLS 8.1

The major reason that we are unable to use Oracle for NLS systems is that Oracle does not support NLS ordered indexes. Thus although we can get rows returned in NLS ordering ( using an ORDER BY clause which specifies the NLSSORT function on the required keys) this always results in Oracle doing a sort on the returned rows . As you can imagine this really kills performance

Ideally we would like the ability to specify that individual keys of a multi-key index should be stored in NLS order ( i.e. not the entire index )

The problem is very similar to the issue we have with DESCENDING keys in a multi-key index.

Our current workaround for DESCENDING keys is to invert CHAR fields and create an ASCENDING index over the inverted field. For NLSed keys in the NLS CER we use a similar approach by storing the result of applying the NLSSORT to the CHAR field and creating an index over this NLSSORTed value.

We would certainly be interested in any other user's approach to this problem or indeed if other users consider it to be a problem ! Received on Fri Oct 23 1998 - 04:34:34 CDT