Introduction

Handling text data in the languages of the world

OLAP Services, like the RDBMS, has been engineered so that it can be deployed internationally with a minimum of customization required on site. As the system administrator, you need to identify the smallest available character set that is able to represent all of your data, the language preferred by most of your users, and the geographic region where most of them live. With this information, OLAP Services is able to read, write, and manipulate data from a variety of sources without a loss of that data, and it is able to present the data in ways that are appropriate to its users.

The ability to operate gracefully in multiple languages and cultures thus has two aspects: the internal encoding of the data, and the external display of the data.

Internationalization and localization

OLAP Services has been internationalized so that it can be deployed in various languages and regions without requiring that the program code be modified and recompiled. For example, status messages are stored separately instead of being embedded in the program code. These error messages are provided in all of the supported languages, and the appropriate ones are determined by the configuration settings.

Localization is the process of adapting to the user's linguistic, cultural, and geographic environment. The most basic is the character set, which specifies the available characters as well as how the data is manipulated internally. Two properties modify the basic specification of the character set:

• Language. Indicates the terms that should be used for "Yes" and "No," the days of the week, the months of the year, and the language used to display error messages. It also identifies the appropriate sorting sequences.

• Territory. Identifies conventions such as calendar, date formats, local currency symbols, and numeric formats that vary by geographic region.

When the localization parameters are set correctly, OLAP Services can communicate with client applications, external files and data sources, and the operating system, even though they might use a variety of different character sets and support users throughout the world.