Hi rk,

Thanks for your prompt updates!

Unfortunately, I have consulted through many internal ways, However, I am
afraid it is not support both in Windows and SQL Server. Frankly, I am not
an expert on language so that I don't know some third party tools for
Dhivehi.

I'd recommend that you forward the recommendation to the Microsoft Wish
Program if I may:

Microsoft offers several ways for you to send comments or suggestions about
Microsoft products. If you have suggestions for product enhancements that
you would like to see in future versions of Microsoft products, please
contact us using one of the methods listed later in this article.

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World Wide Web - To send a comment or suggestion via the Web, use one of
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the link in the Product Suggestion section of the page that appears.
In Windows XP, click Help and Support on the Start menu. Click Send your
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appears.
Visit the following Microsoft Web site:

http://www.microsoft.com/ms.htm


Click Microsoft.com Guide in the upper-right corner of the page and then
click Contact Us . Click the link in the Product Suggestion section of the
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Visit the following Microsoft Product Feedback Web site

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and then complete and submit the form.

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Microsoft Wish Program e-mail address, mswish@microsoft.com.

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FAX number, (425) 936-7329.

NOTE : Address the FAX to the attention of the Microsoft Wish Program.

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Attn. Microsoft Wish Program
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Thank you for your patience and cooperation again. If you have any
questions or concerns, don't hesitate to let me know. We are here to be of
assistance!


Sincerely yours,

Mingqing Cheng
Microsoft Developer Community Support
---------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction to Yukon! - http://www.microsoft.com/sql/yukon
This posting is provided "as is" with no warranties and confers no rights.
Please reply to newsgroups only, many thanks!

Hi rk,

I did some research and I would like to share what I found with you.

First of all, Dhivehi is supported in Unicode 3.0 (It's new to Unicode 3.0
and was not supported in Unicode 2.0). Dhivehi uses the Thaana script, and
Unicode 3.0 does define characters from this script.

Secondly, SQL doesn't have a collation that specifically targets this
language.
However, SQL supports Unicode datatypes nvarchar/nchar. Unfortunately
again, SQL 2000 was released prior to Unicode 3.0 so it doesn't know about
the specific "meaning" of the characters in the Thaana alphabet.

In all, you can safely store and retrieve Dhivehi in SQL 2000 as
nvarchar/nchar. but there will be some significant limitations. For
example:
1. Because SQL uses an older rev of the Unicode standard that preceded the
addition of Thaana characters, it won't intelligently sort or compare
strings written in Dhivehi. In particular, all Thaana characters will be
considered undefined Unicode code points. SQL treats all undefined code
points as equivalent, so every Thaana character will be considered equal to
all other Thaana characters (and also equal to any other undefined code
point).
2. Because of the above, you can retrieve the data but you can't do a
string
search. E.g. the following query will work:
SELECT customer_name FROM customers WHERE cust_id = 1234
But this version won't work (it will return all the customers because the
two characters in the search string are undefined as far as SQL knows):
SELECT * FROM customers WHERE customer_name LIKE '? ?%'

Hope this helps and if you have any questions or concerns, don't hesitate
to let me know. We are here to be of assistance!


Sincerely yours,

Mingqing Cheng
Microsoft Developer Community Support
---------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction to Yukon! - http://www.microsoft.com/sql/yukon
This posting is provided "as is" with no warranties and confers no rights.
Please reply to newsgroups only, many thanks!

Hi RK,

Thanks for your reply!

Certainly I will post here if anything else valuable I found on this
topic:)
Thanks for sharing your experience in MSDN Newsgroup in advance! You are
warmly welcome raising your questions in the newsgroup!

Sincerely yours,

Mingqing Cheng
Microsoft Developer Community Support
---------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction to Yukon! - http://www.microsoft.com/sql/yukon
This posting is provided "as is" with no warranties and confers no rights.
Please reply to newsgroups only, many thanks!

Dear Mingqing Chen,
Thanks for your input.
I too am doing some research, and thinking of some sort of translator
sitting in the middle tier which will sort of convert between (or rather
map between) Thana and some other language supported by
SQL Server 2000. Will post the result here if it works out.
Once again thanks for the inputs given, and in case you come across
any new information, please post here.
Thanks & regards,
rk