Collection Contents Index CHAPTER 12.  Database Collations and International Languages Introduction to character sets and collations pdf/chap12.pdf

User's Guide
   PART 1. Working with Databases
     CHAPTER 12. Database Collations and International Languages       

Introduction


This section provides an introduction to the issues you may face when working in an environment that uses more than one character set, or when using languages other than English.

Top of page  Overview of language issues

Pieces in the client/server puzzle 

Database users working at client applications may see or access text that comes from several possible sources:

For a satisfactory working environment, all these sources of text must work together. Loosely speaking, they must all be working in the user's language, but what exactly is involved in this?

Pieces in the character set puzzle 

There are several distinct aspects to character storage and display by computer software:

Tasks for the database server 

The database server receives strings from client applications as streams of bytes. It associates these bytes with characters according to the collation specified when the database was created. If the data is held in an indexed column, the index is sorted according to the sort order of the collation.

Client side tasks 

It is up to the operating system of the computer on which the client application is running to handle the following aspects of character strings:

Top of page  Who needs to read this chapter?

If your character data consists of characters in the English alphabet, you probably do not need to use this chapter.

If you have an existing setup that does not display language problems, you probably do not need to read this chapter.

Top of page  How Adaptive Server Anywhere addresses language issues

Adaptive Server Anywhere has support for all the language issues discussed in the previous sections.

The other sections in this chapter provide detailed descriptions of character set and language issues.

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Collection Contents Index CHAPTER 12.  Database Collations and International Languages Introduction to character sets and collations pdf/chap12.pdf