Documentation Source Text

Whenever two text values are compared by SQLite, a collation sequence is
used to determine the results of the comparison according to the following
rules. Sections 3 and 5 of this document describe the circumstances under
which such a comparison takes place.
</p>  

<p>
For binary comparison operators (=, &lt;, &gt;, &lt;= and &gt;=) if either
operand is a column, then the default collation type of the column determines
the collation sequence to use for the comparison. If both operands are
columns, then the collation type for the left operand determines the collation
sequence used. If neither operand is a column, then the BINARY collation
sequence is used.  For the purposes of this paragraph, a column name
preceded by one or more unary "+" operators is considered a column name.
</p>  

<p>
The expression "x BETWEEN y and z" is equivalent to "x &gt;= y AND x &lt;=

the byte sequence of the text will not be modified in any way.
</p>

<h3>User-defined Collating Sequences</h3>

<p>
A collating sequence is just a defined order for text.  When SQLite 3.0
sorts (or uses a comparison operator like "&lt;" or "&gt;=") the sort
order is first determined by the data type.
</p>

<ul>
<li>NULLs sort first</li>
<li>Numeric values sort next in numerical order</li>
<li>Text values come after numerics</li>
<li>BLOBs sort last</li>