We use to use 850 with older versions of Sybase but that is no longer
an option with Sybase 11. We have about 40 databases that were
converted using dbunload and the collation is now IBM850. We want to
create new databases that will have matching settings however, 850 and
IBM850 are not valid options for dbinit. What current collation
settings are identical to 850 or IBM850 that we can use?

I'm not an expert in this but a look in the documentation

http://dcx.sybase.com/index.html#110...n-natlang.html

Shows that it should be possible.

dbinit -le lists all possible collations build into you ASA Version

http://dcx.sybase.com/index.html#110...s-3054843.html

Thank you for the reply, those documents were extremely helpful.

Let me clarify my situation because my initial post was misleading. I
previously confused "collation sequence" with "collation encoding".

Our problem is this: we unloaded 40 or so databases to Sybase 11 using
the "-an" flag and it preserved our old collation sequence of "850".
However, when we use dbinit to create new databases we are unable to
find a collation sequence that matches this legacy "850" collation.
We did find a collation sequence named "internal - code page 850,
multilingual" that appears to have the same sorting properties as the
legacy "850" collation.

Can anyone from Sybase confirm that the collations are equivalent for
sorting purposes?

Please ask your question also at http://sqla.stackexchange.com.

Thanks