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.
This change fixes:
MCOL-4462 CAST(varchar_expr AS DECIMAL(M,N)) returns a wrong result
MCOL-4500 Bit functions processing throws internally trying to cast char into decimal representation
MCOL-4532 CAST(AS DECIMAL) returns a garbage for large values
Also, this change makes string-to-decimal conversion 5-10 times faster,
depending on exact data.
Performance implemenent is achieved by the fact that (unlike in the old
implementation), the new version does not do any "string" object copying.
