The idea is relatively simple - encode prefixes of collated strings as
integers and use them to compute extents' ranges. Then we can eliminate
extents with strings.
The actual patch does have all the code there but miss one important
step: we do not keep collation index, we keep charset index. Because of
this, some of the tests in the bugfix suite fail and thus main
functionality is turned off.
The reason of this patch to be put into PR at all is that it contains
changes that made CHAR/VARCHAR columns unsigned. This change is needed in
vectorization work.