Hi everybody
First of all, I must say that this is my first approach to collations, languages , sort orders, etc...
I work in an international company, that works in different countries all over the world. Before now, we haven't had problems with languages because, almost everything was in spanish or english, so we can store all the data correctly. But now, We have to store german messages in tables, and I don't know what to do. Because the apllication is still in english but some columns must show german characters.
What do you recommend me?
We'll have to store chinese in three months time !!! so, i wonder if there is a way to be prepare to store this data in the same server.
Thank you very much in advance!!! (and sorry for my english)
Julia.
I do not know what your case exactly is but next two proposes are exposed:
One solution is to have different databases with different collations (one for each language you need).
If you need to maintain all your data in one database next will be the right solution:
If you have to store chinese characters, spanish, german, etc. in just one database, one solution (I think the only one) is to convert your character datatypes to unicode:
nchar, nvarchar and ntext use unicode characters that are saved with two bytes per character instead of one byte. Unicode columns are almost independent of the collation of your database.
On the other hand, query sentences are affected. For exemple, you will have to use:
insert into table1 values (N'hello') instead of: insert into table1 values ('hello')
However, globalization must be studied carefully. I recommend to investigate more before you decide the final solution.
Here you have a good link to start to know more about unicode:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnsql2k/html/sql_dataencoding.asp
Ok! Thank you
I will start with the second option!
You need to localize both the database and application. You can download the Enterprise localization tool kit from the link below and use the second link to localize the application in Visual Studio .NET. A quick trick put XML and others in notepad and save the file as Unicode. Try the links below to get started. I am assuming you know NVarchar and NChar are 4000 and NText is 2gigs. Hope this helps.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6b6fb09f-f25c-48e9-9e26-b55144600da1&DisplayLang=en
http://www.aspnetresources.com/blog/unicode_in_vsnet.aspx
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie
Try the link below I covered SQL Server Chinese collation in detail in another forum. Hope this helps.
http://forums.asp.net/1067798/ShowPost.aspx
