Oracle9i Database: The New Generation Globalization Technology
On October 2, 2000, Oracle announced the Oracle9i
database, the newest generation of the company's RDBMS.
New Features
Significant improvement in clustered
database scalability with Oracle9i Real Application Clusters (formerly
Oracle Parallel Server); new high availability technology including advancements
in standby database technology (Oracle Data Guard) and user-level error
correction with Flashback Query.
Oracle9i includes built-in OLAP, Data Mining
and ETL functions so that the database can act as a single repository
for relational data as well as analytical data. Oracle9i also includes
infrastructure for developers to create hosted applications with common,
collaborative software services.
GLOBALIZATION TECHNOLOGY - AN OVERVIEW
Companies today have an unprecedented opportunity to optimize and expand
their businesses exponentially. With the advent of the worldwide web Internet
and Intranet, applications have the possibility of global exposure. With
92% of the
world's population being non-native English speaking and the international
Internet community being the fastest growing consumers, opportunity knocks.
Statistically a customer is 4 times more likely to make a purchase if
the content is displayed in their native language. So the challenge and
barrier to succeeding in the global market is to have a multilingual enabled
application.
First you must have a way to be able to easily store, retrieve and update
data in any and all languages. Oracle9i provides full support for
Unicode 3.0 the standard for multilingual support. With UTF-8 and UTF-16
support virtually all contemporary languages and scripts of the world
can be easily encoded. This allows customers to develop, deploy, and host
multiple languages in
a single central database. Also Oracle offers the flexibility to have
all data stored in a Unicode database or incrementally store select columns
in the new Unicode data type.
Another key feature is the ability to present information in the users
native localization customs. Things like date, time, currency symbols
and delimiters and collation order are handled seamlessly in Oracle9i.
While Oracle' s localization support is nearly comprehensive there is
the Oracle Locale Builder Utility a graphical tool to do customization
for special support.
Typically most web based applications are multi-tier. Oracle9i provides
several database access products for inserting and retrieving Unicode
data. Oracle offers support for the most commonly used programming environments
such as Java and C/C++. Data is transparently converted between the database
and client programs, which ensures that client programs are independent
of the database
character set. Putting this all together may require migration of legacy
data to a Unicode
environment.
Oracle provides the Character Set Scanner Utility to be able to proactively
detect possible migration problems such as loss or truncation of data
and overall impact analysis.
So what is the Power of Globalization?
Simply speaking it allows companies to reach and expand their business
to "the rest of the world". Creating application and
software products that support the languages and locale customs of the
international consumer community. This is not a trivial task, it requires
much more then translating HTML content and imbedded messages.
