Globalization Support Utilities

Oracle provides you, as the DBA in the increasingly global community, with a set of utilities that will assist you with your job in the globalized environment.

Oracle Locale Builder

Oracle Locale Builder provides an easy-to-use GUI that you can use to facilitate viewing, modifying, and creating locale definitions.

Oracle 9i provides an extensive set of locale definitions that include the languages, territories, character sets, and linguistic sorts that go along with those locales. If you have need to customize any of these existing definitions, or you need to create a new one, the Oracle Locale Builder will assist you in this with an easy-to-use interface through which you can easily view, customize, and define various locale information.

Character Set Scanner

The character set scanner allows you to scan the database to determine whether the character set can be safely changed. It reports on possible problems and fixes that are necessary to undertake the character set migration.

The character set scanner is a command-line utility whose sole purpose is to assist you with character set conversion. It helps to identify areas of possible data loss due to truncation associated with incompatibilities in the character sets. It also identifies the amount of effort required to perform the conversion, and the columns that should be expanded and to what they should be expanded to safely store the new data. The character set scanner provides an overall assessment of the feasibility of the conversion, reports potential migration issues, and checks all the character data to generate its overall summary.

Prior to any character set conversion, the character set scanner should be used, even if you don't think that there are any incompatibilities.