Cyrillic Alphanumeric Ordering Problems

[RADical_Systems]

Hi,

I have a client in Russia using our software in Cyrillic and they are getting what I would describe as "odd" ordering of alphanumeric lists.

When displaying a list of names the order appears alomost random in that there will be a number of A's then a number of B's then again some A's, Some B's, Some C's, Some Z's then some A's again. For example if it was in English they get:

Aberthforth, Brian
Aimes, John,
Charles, A
Charleston, Peter
Avery, J
Bryan, Zoe

It might start off looking OK but then fails. I have a nice screenshot to show the example but I can't post this until I get to 100 points. If allowed I can post a link to the screenshot on our website if that helps.

I have tried running simple queries in ISQL and get the same results:

select customer.keyname from customer order by customer.keyname

They are using SQL Anywhere 10 on Windows 7 and XP.

It has been suggested that changing the collation of the database may help but this is totally new territory for me so thoughgt I would tap up the forum knowledge before I go down completely the wrong route.

Thanks in advance.

Alasdair

Added for Alasdair:

Character set 1252LATIN1, SQLA 10.0.1.3831

[former_SQLA_member1694880]

Wrong collation for Russian, should be 1251CYR instead.

[johnsmirnios]

I agree that the wrong collation is being used; however, it also seems evident that charset translation is being bypassed. If it had not been bypassed, there would be lots of substitution characters in their data and (hopefully) they would have noticed that a different collation was needed. Even with the right collation, bypassing charset translation means that you'll end up with a good old mess once a client using a different charset performs operations on the same database. Well, substitution characters are a mess of their own but it takes work to bypass charset conversion and it was not a good solution to whatever problem prompted them to do so.