sql server (alternate): International Settings for SQL 2000 -- sql server (alternate)

International Settings for SQL 2000

quinto
2/25/2006 2:27:13 PM

sql server (alternate): I will doing an installation of MS SQL 2000 that will be used by multi
language web sites.
The languages are Japanese, German and of course English.

Currently I'm planning to install MS SQL 2000 standard version but
after reading some articles I'm considering the Enterprise version.

Can someone shed some light on the advantages of using Enterprise vs
Standard strictly from a language support perspective?

Also, is there any caveats or other considerations that I should keep
in mind to make sure that the developers have all they need to develop
these multi language sites?

Thanks in advance.

Re: International Settings for SQL 2000

Erland Sommarskog
2/26/2006 5:53:55 PM

quinto (fiorelli.m@gmail.com) writes:
[quoted text, click to view]

I can't think of any.

[quoted text, click to view]

First of all, you need to decide on how to store the multi-lingual
data. In clear text this means you need to settle on how to store
the Japanese data. I would settle for Unicode and use nvarchar columns,
but I believe Shift-JIS is still in widely use, and this if you charset
varchar is your choice.

To get a multi-lingual application right, you need to make a basic
design right from the start, because later on, it can be very difficult
to change. And very expensive.

In our application, about all tables that define entities have a
"name table" which holds the names of the entities in various languages.
So for, say, instrumenttypes with ityid as the primary key, there is
also a table instrumenttypenames with ityid and languageid as PK. I
should that this far we support only the Nordic languages togther with
German and English.

But that is only part of the problem. One thing we have entirely
negclected is the collation, which controls sorting and comparison.
If users are to perform searches, you may have to have different
collations for the various languages. This is another issue you need
to research early.

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
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