You'll need to add another column with ascii-ized strings and compare it against an ascii-ized search string, but use the primary string as a result. There is no way to convince Informix to do that for you, especially if you want it fetched from an index.
On a side note, if you had all the strings in Java memory, you could use a SortedMap
with a custom, Collator
-based Comparator
.