About Globalization Support Features

Globalization support features enable you to develop multilingual applications that can be run simultaneously from anywhere in the world. An application can render the content of the user interface, and process data, using the native language and locale preferences of the user.

Note:

In the past, Oracle called globalization support National Language Support (NLS), but NLS is actually a subset of globalization support. NLS is the ability to choose a national language and store data using a specific character set. NLS is implemented with NLS parameters.

See Also: Oracle Database Globalization Support Guide for more information about globalization support features

About Language Support

Oracle Database enables you to store, process, and retrieve data in native languages. The languages that can be stored in a database are all languages written in scripts that are encoded by Oracle-supported character sets. Through the use of Unicode databases and data types, Oracle Database supports most contemporary languages.

Additional support is available for a subset of the languages. The database can, for example, display dates using translated month names, and can sort text data according to cultural conventions.

In this document, the term language support refers to the additional language-dependent functionality, and not to the ability to store text of a specific language. For example, language support includes displaying dates or sorting text according to specific locales and cultural conventions. Additionally, for some supported languages, Oracle Database provides translated server messages and a translated user interface for the database utilities.

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About Territory Support

The default local time format, date format, and numeric and monetary conventions depend on the local territory setting.

Oracle Database supports cultural conventions that are specific to geographical locations. The default local time format, date format, and numeric and monetary conventions depend on the local territory setting. Setting different NLS parameters enables the database session to use different cultural settings. For example, you can set the euro (EUR) as the primary currency and the Japanese yen (JPY) as the secondary currency for a given database session, even when the territory is AMERICA.

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About Date and Time Formats

Different countries have different conventions for displaying the hour, day, month, and year.

For example, this table shows the local date and time format for five countries and gives an example of each format:

Country Date Format Example Time Format Example
China yyyy-mm-dd 2005-02-28 hh24:mi:ss 13:50:23
Estonia dd.mm.yyyy 28.02.2005 hh24:mi:ss 13:50:23
Germany dd.mm.rr 28.02.05 hh24:mi:ss 13:50:23
UK dd/mm/yyyy 28/02/2005 hh24:mi:ss 13:50:23
US mm/dd/yyyy 02/28/2005 hh:mi:ssxff am 1:50:23.555 PM

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About Calendar Formats

Different countries use different calendars.

Oracle Database stores this calendar information for each territory:

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About Numeric and Monetary Formats

Different countries have different numeric and monetary conventions.

This table shows the local numeric and monetary format for five countries and gives an example of each format:

Country Numeric Format Monetary Format
China 1,234,567.89 ©1,234.56
Estonia 1 234 567,89 1 234,56 kr
Germany 1.234.567,89 1.234,56€
UK 1,234,567.89 £1,234.56
US 1,234,567.89 $1,234.56

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About Linguistic Sorting and String Searching

Different languages have different sort orders (collating sequences). Also, different countries or cultures that use the same alphabets sort words differently. For example, in Danish, Æ is after Z, and Y and Ü are considered to be variants of the same letter.

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About Length Semantics

To calculate the number of characters in a string, using byte length, you must know the number of bytes in each character in the character set.

In single-byte character sets, the number of bytes and the number of characters in a string are the same. In multibyte character sets, a character or code point consists of one or more bytes. Calculating the number of characters based on byte length can be difficult in a variable-width character set. Calculating column length in bytes is called byte semantics , while measuring column length in characters is called character semantics.

Character semantics is useful for specifying the storage requirements for multibyte strings of varying widths. For example, in a Unicode database (AL32UTF8), suppose that you must have a VARCHAR2 column that can store up to five Chinese characters with five English characters. Using byte semantics, this column requires 15 bytes for the Chinese characters, which are 3 bytes long, and 5 bytes for the English characters, which are 1 byte long, for a total of 20 bytes. Using character semantics, the column requires 10 characters.

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About Unicode and SQL National Character Data Types

Unicode is a character encoding system that defines every character in most of the spoken languages in the world. In Unicode, every character has a unique code, regardless of the platform, program, or language.

You can store Unicode characters in an Oracle Database in two ways:

The SQL national character data types are NCHAR, NVARCHAR2, and NCLOB. They are also called Unicode data types , because they are used only for storing Unicode data.

The national character set, which is used for all SQL national character data types, is specified when the database is created. The national character set can be either UTF8 or AL16UTF16 (default).

When you declare a column or variable of the type NCHAR or NVARCHAR2, the length that you specify is the number of characters, not the number of bytes.

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