Oracle9i Database Development: The New Generation Web Globalization Technology

On October 2, 2000, Oracle announced the Oracle9i database, the newest generation of the company's RDBMS.

New Features

Significant improvement in clustered
database scalability with Oracle9i Real Application Clusters (formerly Oracle Parallel Server); new high availability technology including advancements in standby database technology (Oracle Data Guard) and user-level error correction with Flashback Query.

Oracle9i includes built-in OLAP, Data Mining and ETL functions so that the database can act as a single repository for relational data as well as analytical data. Oracle9i also includes infrastructure for developers to create hosted applications with common, collaborative software services.

GLOBALIZATION TECHNOLOGY - AN OVERVIEW

Companies today have an unprecedented opportunity to optimize and expand their businesses exponentially. With the advent of the worldwide web Internet and Intranet, applications have the possibility of global exposure. With 92% of the
world's population being non-native English speaking and the international Internet community being the fastest growing consumers, opportunity knocks.
Statistically a customer is 4 times more likely to make a purchase if the content is displayed in their native language. So the challenge and barrier to succeeding in the global market is to have a multilingual enabled application.

First you must have a way to be able to easily store, retrieve and update data in any and all languages. Oracle9i provides full support for
Unicode 3.0 the standard for multilingual support. With UTF-8 and UTF-16 support virtually all contemporary languages and scripts of the world can be easily encoded. This allows customers to develop, deploy, and host multiple languages in
a single central database. Also Oracle offers the flexibility to have all data stored in a Unicode database or incrementally store select columns in the new Unicode data type.

Another key feature is the ability to present information in the users native localization customs. Things like date, time, currency symbols and delimiters and collation order are handled seamlessly in Oracle9i. While Oracle' s localization support is nearly comprehensive there is the Oracle Locale Builder Utility a graphical tool to do customization for special support.

Typically most web based applications are multi-tier. Oracle9i provides several database access products for inserting and retrieving Unicode data. Oracle offers support for the most commonly used programming environments such as Java and C/C++. Data is transparently converted between the database and client programs, which ensures that client programs are independent of the database
character set. Putting this all together may require migration of legacy data to a Unicode environment.

Oracle provides the Character Set Scanner Utility to be able to proactively detect possible migration problems such as loss or truncation of data
and overall impact analysis.

So what is the Power of Globalization?

Simply speaking it allows companies to reach and expand their business to "the rest of the world". Creating application and software products that support the languages and locale customs of the international consumer community. This is not a trivial task, it requires much more then translating HTML content and imbedded messages.