Oracle-L: RE: International Language Support Experiences?

From: John Kanagaraj <john.kanagaraj_at_hds.com>
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 11:59:26 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.005CD860.20030827115926@fatcity.com>

David,

I can share this from an Oracle Apps perspective - we upgraded to UTF8 (a multi byte char set) from WE8ISO5599-1 (single byte Western Eur charset). Some of the biggest problems that we faced are:

Cut-and-paste produces incorrect characters which were acceptable in WE8 but failed conversion. I.e. UTF8 is stricter in what it can display as compared to WE8. This was pronounced in the umlaut and other Eur specific characters.
Quite a number of third-party applications do not support UTF8 - when asked about Unicode support, many vendors didn't even know what it would mean to support a MBCS such as UTF-8. This may also be the case with your own applications.
Middle-ware layers such as ODBC/JDBC don't work very well with UTF8 in the sense that the rules have become stricter and so programs that used to work previously will now fail mysteriously with vague messages (or worse still silently!).
A column which supports text elements that may now handle MBCs will require more storage width than previously designed for. Thus you may have to look at schema changes to increase VARCHAR2/CHAR columns..
Oracle products themselves may need some patches - you mention iAS - and have functional restrictions.
The

You won't hit 1 because you are moving from US7ASCII (7 bit) but watch out for the rest! ML Note 158577.1 is a good starting point. I would read this one (and the related links) before the 450 pages - you seem to like reading :)

John Kanagaraj
DB Soft Inc
Phone: 408-970-7002 (W)

Disappointment is inevitable, but Discouragement is optional!

The opinions and facts contained in this message are entirely mine and do not reflect those of my employer or customers **

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2003 11:35 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

We have a new requirement to support multiple languages in at least one of our databases. I'm reading the Oracle 9iR2 Globalization Support Guide (450 pages), but wonder if any of you can share real-life experiences regarding:

the conversion of existing DBs to broader character sets
using Unicode
implementing this with 9iAS

Our databases currently use US7ASCII with the American character set, but we will likely need to support European, Southeast Asian, and South American languages.

Thanks.

Best regards,

David B. Wagoner
Database Administrator
Arsenal Digital Solutions

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Author: John Kanagaraj
INET: john.kanagaraj_at_hds.com

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