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.
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Note: The National Language Support Parameters report lists the values of parameters for globalization support. For information about this and other SQL Developer reports, see SQL Developer Reports. |
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.
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.
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.
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.
Linguistic Sorting
Oracle provides linguistic definitions for culturally accurate sorting and case conversion.
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.