Globalization Support


For Oracle, globalization support means the assurance that database utilities, error messages, dates, times, monetary information, sort orders, numbers, and calendar conventions automatically adapt to the native language for the location where the access is occurring.

Oracle currently supports more than 55 different languages in nearly 90 territories, 84 different linguistic sorts, and 235 different encoded character sets. This means that there are possibilities for reaching nearly any user, client, or customer in nearly any location in the world in their native language.

The language-dependent operations in Oracle are controlledyou guessed itby a number of parameters and environment variables both on the client machine and on the server. This is because the server may not be running in the same location, or the same part of the world as the client is running. But regardless of where the two pieces are, if they are using different character sets, the Oracle server can handle the character set conversions automatically and transparently to the user.

Users can interact with the database and store, process, and retrieve data in their native language. Different countries often dictate different cultural conventions that may directly affect the formatting of data. This includes but is not limited to different character sets and custom sort orders for different languages and locations.

Date and time formats can be expressed to the user either according to ISO conversions for years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, and fractions of sections, or time zone regions can be used to support things such as Daylight Savings Time in the US. Different calendar formats can be used to present accurate data to the user in her own calendar conventions such as Gregorian, Japanese, Imperial, and Thai Buddha.

Numerical data can be presented to users in the local format they are used to. This can extend to the use of the "," or the "." character as the separation character in a number string.

Currency symbols that reflect the local economy and ISO conventions as well as credit and debit symbols for accounting also can be customized based on different locations.

Let's continue by looking at the database character sets and encoding schemes.



    Oracle 9i Fundamentals I Exam Cram 2
    Oracle 9i Fundamentals I Exam Cram 2
    ISBN: 0789732653
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2004
    Pages: 244
    Authors: April Wells

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