What's New in Globalization Support?

This section describes new features of globalization support, provides pointers to related information in this book, and contains these topics:

• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) New Features in Globalization

• Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) New Features in Globalization

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) New Features in Globalization

• Support for simplified patching of TIMESTAMP WITH TIMEZONE data type values

  Prior to Oracle Database 11g Release 2, patching TIMESTAMP WITH TIMEZONE data values manually on the database after the time zone file had been updated was a tedious process. Now, this patching is simplified and transparent.

  In addition, OCI, JDBC, Pro*C, and SQL*Plus clients can now continue to communicate with the server without having to update client-side time zone files, but there are some considerations when working in such a mixed mode.

  See Also:

  • Chapter 4, "Datetime Data Types and Time Zone Support"

  • Oracle Call Interface Programmer's Guide for the ramifications of operating in a mixed mode where the client and the server have different versions of time zone files

Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) New Features in Globalization

• Support for Unicode 5.0, a major version of the Unicode Standard that supercedes all previous versions of the standard.

  • 1,369 new character assignments have been made to the Unicode Standard. These additions include new characters for Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Kannada, Latin, math, phonetic extensions, symbols.

  • New scripts have been added in Unicode 5.0: N'Ko, Balinese, Phags-pa, Phoenician, Cuneiform.

  • Improvements have been made in how to use characters, for example, their properties or display algorithms.

  • In addition to classifications for all of the new characters, a number of Southeast Asian characters have been re-classified.

  See Also:

  • Chapter 1, "Overview of Globalization Support"

  • Chapter 6, "Supporting Multilingual Databases with Unicode"

• Recommended Database Character Sets and Statement of Direction

  A list of character sets has been compiled that Oracle strongly recommends for usage as the database character set. For new system deployment, the database character set is limited to this list of recommended character sets.

  See Also:

  • Chapter 2, "Choosing a Character Set"

  • Appendix A, "Locale Data"

• Improved performance for character set conversion.

• New report section for Database Character Set Scanner that provides information about compact binary XML (CSX) data in the Data Dictionary.

  See Also:

  Chapter 12, "Character Set Scanner Utilities"

• GINSTALL utility for adding customized locale files to Java components.

  See Also:

  Chapter 13, "Customizing Locale Data"

• Three new languages added: Albanian, Belarusian, and Irish, and two new territories added: Albania and Belarus.

  See Also:

  Appendix A, "Locale Data"

• Linguistic index support for collation-sensitive SQL LIKE condition.

  See Also:

  Chapter 5, "Linguistic Sorting and String Searching"