A collating order, specified by the locale argument of the CompactDatabase method, determines how Microsoft Jet sorts the data in your database. This is important because the character sets in different languages may require a language-specific sort order. If the wrong collating order is specified, data may not sort properly. You can specify a collating order when you create the database, or when you compact it. If you do not want to change the database’s collating order during the compacting process, leave the locale argument blank. The following table lists the constants you can use in the locale argument to specify various collating orders.
| Constant | Collating order |
| dbLangGeneral | English, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Modern Spanish |
| dbLangArabic | Arabic |
| dbLangChineseSimplified | Simplified Chinese |
| dbLangChineseTraditional | Traditional Chinese |
| dbLangCyrillic | Russian |
| dbLangCzech | Czech |
| dbLangDutch | Dutch |
| dbLangGreek | Greek |
| dbLangHebrew | Hebrew |
| dbLangHungarian | Hungarian |
| dbLangIcelandic | Icelandic |
| dbLangJapanese | Japanese |
| dbLangKorean | Korean |
| dbLangNordic | Nordic languages (Microsoft Jet 1.0 only) |
| dbLangNorwDan | Norwegian and Danish |
| dbLangPolish | Polish |
| dbLangSlovenian | Slovenian |
| dbLangSpanish | Traditional Spanish |
| dbLangSwedFin | Swedish and Finnish |
| dbLangThai | Thai |
| dbLangTurkish | Turkish |