A Locale Data

Languages

Languages in Table A-1 provide support for locale-sensitive information such as the following:

• Day and month names and their abbreviations

• Symbols for equivalent expressions for A.M., P.M., A.D., and B.C.

• Default sorting sequence for character data when the ORDER BY SQL clause is specified

• Writing direction (left to right or right to left)

• Affirmative and negative response strings (for example, YES and NO)

By using Unicode databases and datatypes, you can store, process, and retrieve data for almost all contemporary languages, including many that do not appear in Table A-1.

Translated Messages

Oracle error messages have been translated into the languages which are listed in Table A-2.

Territories

Table A-3 lists the territories supported by the Oracle server.

Character Sets

Oracle-supported character sets are listed in the following sections according to three broad categories.

• Recommended Database Character Sets

• Other Character Sets

• Client-Only Character Sets

In addition, common character set subset/superset combinations are listed. Some character sets can only be used with certain data types. For example, the AL16UTF16 character set can only be used as an NCHAR character set, and not as a database character set.

Also documented in the comment section are other unique features of the character set that may be important to users or your database administrator. For example, the information includes whether the character set supports the euro currency symbol, whether user-defined characters are supported, and whether the character set is a strict superset of ASCII. (You can use the CSALTER script to migrate an existing database to a new character set, only if all of the schema data is a strict subset of the new character set.)

The following is the key for the comment column of the character set tables:

SB: single-byte encoding

MB: multibyte encoding

FIXED: fixed-width multibyte encoding

ASCII: strict superset of ASCII

EURO: euro symbol supported

UDC: user-defined characters supported

Oracle does not document individual code page layouts. For specific details about a particular character set, its character repertoire, and code point values, you can use Oracle Locale Builder. Otherwise, you should refer to the actual national, international, or vendor-specific standards.

Language and Character Set Detection Support

Table A-13 displays the languages and character sets that are supported by the language and character set detection in the Character Set Scanner utilities (CSSCAN and LCSSCAN) and the Globalization Development Kit (GDK).

Each language has several character sets that can be detected.

When the binary values for a language match two or more encodings that have a subset/superset relationship, the subset character set is returned. For example, if the language is German and all characters are 7-bit, then US7ASCII is returned instead of WE8MSWIN1252, WE8ISO8859P15, or WE8ISO8859P1.

When the character set is determined to be UTF-8, the Oracle character set UTF8 is returned by default unless 4-byte characters (supplementary characters) are detected within the text. If 4-byte characters are detected, then the character set is reported as AL32UTF8.

Linguistic Sorts

Oracle offers two kinds of linguistic sorts, monolingual and multilingual. In addition, monolingual sorts can be extended to handle special cases. These special cases (represented with a prefix X) typically mean that the characters are sorted differently from their ASCII values. For example, ch and ll are treated as a single character in XSPANISH.

All of the linguistic sorts can be also be performed as case-insensitive or accent-insensitive by appending _CI or _AI to the linguistic sort name.

Table A-14 lists the monolingual linguistic sorts supported by the Oracle server.

Table A-15 lists the multilingual linguistic sorts available in Oracle. All of them include GENERIC_M (an ISO standard for sorting Latin-based characters) as a base. Multilingual linguistic sorts are used for a specific primary language together with Latin-based characters. For example, KOREAN_M sorts Korean and Latin-based characters, but it does not collate Chinese, Thai, or Japanese characters.

Calendar Systems

By default, most territory definitions use the Gregorian calendar system. Table A-14 lists the other calendar systems supported by the Oracle server.

Figure A-1 shows how March 27, 1998 appears in Japanese Imperial.

Figure A-1 Japanese Imperial Example

Description of the illustration nlspg005.gif

Time Zone Names

Table A-17 shows the time zone names in the default time zone file that is supplied with the Oracle Database. The default time zone file is $ORACLE_HOME/oracore/zoneinfo/timezlrg.dat. Oracle also supplies a smaller time zone file, $ORACLE_HOME/oracore/zoneinfo/timezone/dat. See Chapter 4, "Datetime Datatypes and Time Zone Support" for more information regarding time zone files.

Obsolete Locale Data

This section contains information about obsolete linguistic sorts, character sets, languages, and territories. The obsolete linguistic sort, language, and territory definitions are still available. However, they are supported for backward compatibility only; they may be desupported in a future release. You can obtain a listing of the obsolete character sets, languages, territories, and linguistic sorts for the current database release by querying the V$NLS_VALID_VALUES view.