20 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002. All rights reserved. Using Globalization Support 20-2 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002. All rights reserved. Objectives After completing this lesson, you should be able to do the following: • Choose database character sets and national character sets for a database • Specify the language-dependent behavior by using initialization parameters, environment variables, and the ALTER SESSION command • Use the different types of National Language Support (NLS) parameters • Explain the influence on language-dependent application behavior • Obtain Globalization Support Usage Information 20-3 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002. All rights reserved. Globalization Support Features • Language support • Territory support • Character set support • Linguistic sorting • Message support • Date and time formats • Numeric formats • Monetary formats 20-5 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002. All rights reserved. Encoding Schemes Oracle supports different classes of character encoding schemes: • Single-byte character sets – 7-bit – 8-bit • Varying-width multibyte character sets • Fixed-width multibyte character sets • Unicode (AL32UTF8, AL16UTF16, UTF8) 20-8 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002. All rights reserved. Database Character Sets and National Character Sets Can store Unicode using either AL16UTF16 or UTF8 Can store varying-width character sets Store data columns of type NCHAR, NVARCHAR2, NCLOB Store data columns of type CHAR, VARCHAR2, CLOB, LONG Cannot be changed without re- creation, few exceptions Cannot be change without re-creation Defined at creation timeDefined at creation time National Character SetsDatabase Character Sets 20-9 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002. All rights reserved. Guidelines for Choosing an Oracle Database Character Set Considerations: • What language must the database support? • What are interoperability concerns with system resources and applications? • What are the performance implications? • What are the restrictions? 20-11 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002. All rights reserved. Guidelines for Choosing an Oracle National Character Set • Two choices: – AL16UTF16 – UTF8 • Is space an issue? • Is performance an issue? 20-12 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002. All rights reserved. Choosing a Unicode Solution: Unicode Database When should you use a Unicode database? • Easy code migration for Java or PL/SQL • Easy data migration from ASCII based data • Evenly distributed multilingual data • InterMedia Text Search 20-13 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002. All rights reserved. Choosing a Unicode Solution: Unicode Data Type When should you use a Unicode data type? • While adding multilingual support incrementally • Packaged applications • Performance: Single byte database character set with a fixed-width national character set • Better support for UTF-16 with Windows clients 20-14 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002. All rights reserved. [...]... Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002 All rights reserved Using NLS Parameters in SQL Functions SELECT TO_CHAR(hire_date,’DD.Mon.YYYY’, ‘NLS_DATE_LANGUAGE=FRENCH’) FROM employees; SELECT ename, TO_CHAR(sal,’9G999D99’, ‘NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS=‘‘,.’’’) FROM emp; 20-27 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002 All rights reserved Linguistic Index Support • Linguistic indexing • High performance with local... Import and Loading Data Using NLS • Data is converted from the export file character set to the database character set during the import • SQL*Loader: – Conventional Path: Data is converted into the session character set specified by NLS_LANG – Direct Path: Data is converted directly into the database character set 20-32 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002 All rights reserved Using NLS Parameters in... All rights reserved Summary In this lesson, you should have learned how to: • Choose a database character set and a national character set for the database • Use the various types of National Language Support parameters for the server, or the session 20-39 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002 All rights reserved Practice 20 Overview This practice covers the following topics: • Checking the database . behavior • Obtain Globalization Support Usage Information 20-3 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002. All rights reserved. Globalization Support Features • Language support • Territory. 20 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002. All rights reserved. Using Globalization Support 20-2 Copyright © Oracle Corporation, 2002. All rights reserved. Objectives After