Chapter 10. Understanding Globalization Support
ORACLE DATABASE 10G: ADMINISTRATION II EXAM OBJECTIVES COVERED IN THIS CHAPTER:
Customize language-dependent behavior for the database and individual sessions.
Specify different linguistic sorts for queries.
Use datetime datatypes.
Query data using case-insensitive and accent-insensitive searches.
Obtain Globalization support configuration information.
NOTE
Exam objectives are subject to change at any time without prior notice and at Oracle's sole discretion. Please visit Oracle's Training and Certification website (http://www.oracle.com/education/certification/) for the most current exam objectives listing.
Doing business on a global scale presents a new set of challenges to any company, especially to the DBA. Beyond the obvious issues of language lie a host of less obvious but equally important issues that must be addressed—time zone differences, mixed currency types, and differing calendars, just to name a few. But Oracle's globalization support features provide the tools needed to meet these challenges.
Globalization support enables you to manage data in multiple languages. It provides the functionality to ensure that native language and locale conventions are followed when dealing with date, time, currency, numeric, and calendar data.
Globalization support also offers new datetime datatype options for handling transactions crossing time zones. It also provides a rich set of options for linguistic sorts and searching.
In this chapter, you will see how, with the release of Oracle Database 10g (Oracle 10g), Oracle has positioned itself as the database of choice for companies doing business internationally. You'll learn what globalization support entails and how it all fits together. You'll see how National Language Support (NLS) parameter settings can change the functionality of many of Oracle's operations. You will learn about datetime datatypes and how they can be used to synchronize data around the globe. You'll also learn about new linguistic sorting and searching options that allow multilingual data to be searched, sorted, and managed simply and efficiently.