10.5. Summary

In this chapter, you learned about Oracle's global support functionality and how it simplifies the issues related to multilingual databases. You learned about the internal architecture that makes globalization support possible. You saw how the NLS Runtime Library (NLSRTL) integrates with the Oracle locale definition files to provide functionality. You also learned that the modular nature of the locale definition files provides great flexibility while reducing memory usage.

You learned about the main components of globalization support: language, territory, character set, and linguistic sorts. You saw how these four components provide default settings for all the other NLS options. You then learned that those default settings can be overridden in a variety of methods.

We introduced you to the many character sets that Oracle supports, including the important Unicode character set. You saw how the Unicode character set can support all known written languages in the world.

You also learned about using NLS parameters to modify your globalization environment as needed. You learned about the different categories of NLS parameters, including language and territory parameters, date and time parameters, linguistic sort parameters, calendar parameters, and more.

This chapter introduced you to the datetime datatypes and explained how the TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE and TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE datatypes can be used to synchronize transactions occurring across time zones.

Lastly, you learned about linguistic sorting and searching and how globalization support allows culturally appropriate sorting and searching. You also learned about monolingual and multilingual sorts and how each evaluates text strings when performing a sort operation. You learned that multilingual sorts can be identified by the _M appended to the sort definition name.

You learned how, in conjunction with linguistic sorting and searching, you can perform case-insensitive and accent-insensitive operations by appending an _CI or _AI to the end of the NLS_SORT parameter value.