Overview of Globalization Support

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Oracle's globalization support enables you to store, process, and retrieve data in native languages. It ensures that database utilities, error messages, sort order, and date, time, monetary, numeric, and calendar conventions automatically adapt to any native language and locale.

Oracle's globalization support includes National Language Support (NLS) features. National Language Support is the ability to choose a national language and store data in a specific character set. Globalization support enables you to develop multilingual applications and software products that can be accessed and run from anywhere in the world simultaneously. An application can render content of the user interface and process data in the native users' languages and locale preferences.

Oracle's standard features include:

• Language Support

  The database enables you to store, process, and retrieve data in native languages. Through the use of Unicode databases and data types, the Oracle database supports most contemporary languages.

  See "Setting NLS Parameters".

• Territory Support

  The database supports cultural conventions that are specific to geographical locations. The default local time format, date format, and numeric and monetary conventions depend on the local territory setting.

  See "Language and Territory Parameters".

• Date and Time Formats

  Different conventions for displaying the hour, day, month, and year can be handled in local formats. Time zones and daylight saving support are also available.

  See "Date and Time Parameters".

• Monetary and Numeric Formats

  Currency, credit, debit symbols, and numbers can be represented in local formats.

  See "Monetary Parameters" and "Numeric and List Parameters".

• Calendars Feature

  Oracle supports seven different calendar systems in use around the world: Gregorian, Japanese Imperial, ROC Official (Republic of China), Thai Buddha, Persian, English Hijrah, and Arabic Hijrah.

  See "Calendar Definitions".

• Linguistic Sorting

  Oracle provides linguistic definitions for culturally accurate sorting and case conversion.

  See "Linguistic Sorting and Searching".

• Character Set Support

  Oracle supports a large number of single-byte, multibyte, and fixed-width encoding schemes that are based on national, international, and vendor-specific standards.

• Character Semantics

  Oracle provides character semantics. It is useful for defining the storage requirements for multibyte strings of varying widths in terms of characters instead of bytes.

  See "Length Semantics".

• Unicode Support

  Unicode is a universal encoded character set that enables you to store information in any language, using a single character set. Oracle Database provides products such as SQL and PL/SQL for inserting and retrieving Unicode data.

  See "SQL and PL/SQL Programming with Unicode".