Relational-operator conditions

The example SELECT statement assumes a nondefault locale and uses relational-operator conditions.

It uses the less than (<) relational operator to specify that the only rows are to be retrieved from the abonnés table are those in which the value of the nom column is less than Hammer.
SELECT numéro,nom,prénom 
   FROM abonnés
   WHERE nom < 'Hammer';
If nom is a CHAR column, the database server uses code-set order of the default code set to retrieve the rows that the WHERE clause specifies. The output shows that this SELECT statement retrieves only two rows.
numéro nom prénom
13612 Azevedo Edouardo Freire
13606 Dupré Michéle Françoise

These two rows are those rows less than Hammer in the code-set-ordered data set shown in ids_gug_137.html#ids_gug_137__sii-03-36085.

However, if nom is an NCHAR column, the database server uses localized order to sort the rows that the WHERE clause specifies. The following example of output shows that this SELECT statement retrieves six rows.
numéro nom prénom
13612 Azevedo Edouardo Freire
13601 Ålesund Sverre
13600 da Sousa João Lourenço Antunes
13615 di Girolamo Giuseppe
13606 Dupré Michéle Françoise
13608 Étaix Émile

These six rows are those rows less than Hammer in the localized-order data set shown in ids_gug_137.html#ids_gug_137__sii-03-14516.