What's New in Globalization Support?

This section describes new features of globalization support and provides pointers to additional information.

Unicode 3.2 Support

This release supports Unicode 3.2.

Accent-Insensitive and Case-Insensitive Linguistic Sorts and Queries

Oracle provides linguistic sorts and queries that use information about base letter, accents, and case to sort character strings.This release enables you to specify a sort or query on the base letters only (accent-insensitive) or on the base letters and the accents (case-insensitive).

Character Set Scanner Utilities Enhancements

The Database Character Set Scanner and Converter now supports object types.

The new LCSD parameter enables the Database Character Set Scanner (CSSCAN) to perform language and character set detection on the data cells categorized by the LCSDATA parameter. The Database Character Set Scanner reports have also been enhanced.

Database Character Set Scanner CSALTER Script

The CSALTER script is a DBA tool for special character set migration.

The Language and Character Set File Scanner Utility

The Language and Character Set File Scanner (LCSSCAN) is a high-performance, statistically based utility for determining the character set and language for unspecified plain file text.

Globalization Development Kit

The Globalization Development Kit (GDK) simplifies the development process and reduces the cost of developing Internet applications that will support a global multilingual market. GDK includes APIs, tools, and documentation that address many of the design, development, and deployment issues encountered in the creation of global applications. GDK lets a single program work with text in any language from anywhere in the world. It enables you to build a complete multilingual server application with little more effort than it takes to build a monolingual server application.

Regular Expressions

This release supports POSIX-compliant regular expressions to enhance search and replace capability in programming environments such as UNIX and Java. In SQL, this new functionality is implemented through new functions that are regular expression extensions to existing SQL functions such as LIKE, REPLACE, and INSTR. This implementation supports multilingual queries and is locale-sensitive.

Displaying Code Charts for Unicode Character Sets

Oracle Locale Builder can display code charts for Unicode character sets.

Locale Variants

In previous releases, Oracle defined language and territory definitions separately. This resulted in the definition of a territory being independent of the language setting of the user. In this release, some territories can have different date, time, number, and monetary formats based on the language setting of a user. This type of language-dependent territory definition is called a locale variant.

Transportable NLB Data

NLB files that are generated on one platform can be transported to another platform by, for example, FTP. The transported NLB files can be used the same way as the NLB files that were generated on the original platform. This is convenient because locale data can be modified on one platform and copied to other platforms.

NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS

NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS is now supported as an environment variable.

Implicit Conversion Between CLOB and NCLOB Datatypes

Implicit conversion between CLOB and NCLOB datatypes is now supported.

Updates to the Oracle Language and Territory Definition Files

Changes have been made to the content in some of the language and territory definition files in Oracle Database 10g.