What's New in Globalization Support?

This section describes new features of globalization support in Oracle9i release 2 (9.2) and provides pointers to additional information.

The following section describes the new features in Oracle globalization support:

• Oracle9i Release 2 (9.2) New Features in Globalization Support

Oracle9i Release 2 (9.2) New Features in Globalization Support

• Unicode 3.1 support

  Oracle9i release 2 (9.2) supports Unicode 3.1.

  See Also: Chapter 5, "Supporting Multilingual Databases with Unicode"

• ALTER TABLE MODIFY statement

  The ALTER TABLE MODIFY statement can be used to change column definitions from the CHAR datatypes to the NCHAR datatypes. It also converts the data in the columns from the CHAR datatypes to the NCHAR datatypes.

  See Also: "Using the ALTER TABLE MODIFY Statement to Change CHAR Columns to NCHAR Columns"

• Oracle Locale Builder enhancements

  You can view and print code charts with Oracle Locale Builder.

  Characters with diacritics can now be viewed in collation trees.

  See Also: "Displaying a Code Chart with the Oracle Locale Builder" "Creating a New Linguistic Sort with the Oracle Locale Builder"

• Character Set Scanner enhancements

  Two new parameters have been added to the Character Set Scanner: EXCLUDE and PRESERVE.

  The TABLE parameter has been extended to support multiple tables.

  Convertible and exceptional data dictionary data are documented in the new "Data Dictionary Individual Exceptions" of the Individual Exception Report.

  See Also: "Character Set Scanner Parameters" "Individual Exception Report"

• Change in euro support

  The members of the European Monetary Union (EMU) use the euro as their currency as of January 1, 2002. Setting NLS_TERRITORY to correspond to a country in the EMU (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain) results in the default values for NLS_CURRENCY and NLS_DUAL_CURRENCY being set to EURO. Beginning with Oracle9i release 2 (9.2), the value of NLS_ISO_CURRENCY results in the ISO currency symbol being set to EUR for EMU member countries.

  See Also: "Oracle Support for the Euro"

• OCIEnvNlsCreate() function

  Use the OCIEnvNlsCreate function to specify client-side database and national character sets when the OCI environment is created.This function allows users to set character set information dynamically in applications, independent of the NLS_LANG and NLS_CHAR initialization parameter settings. In addition, one application can initialize several environment handles for different client environments in the same server environment.

  See Also: "OCIEnvNlsCreate()"

• OCINlsCharSetConvert() function

  This function converts a string from one character set to another.

  See Also: "OCINlsCharSetConvert()"

• OCINlsCharSetNameTold() function

  This function returns the Oracle character set ID for the specified Oracle character set name.

  See Also: "OCINlsCharSetNameTold()"

• OCINlsCharSetIdToName() function

  This function returns the Oracle character set name from the specified character set ID.

  See Also: "OCINlsCharSetIdToName()"

• OCINlsNumericInfoGet() function

  This function generates numeric language information specified by item from the OCI environment handle into an output number variable.

  See Also: "OCINlsNumericInfoGet()"

• OCINlsNameMap() function

  This function maps Oracle character set names, language names, and territory names to and from IANA and ISO names.

  See Also: "OCINlsNameMap()"

• DBMS_LOB.LOADBLOBFROM FILE and DBMS_LOB.LOADCLOBFROM FILE

  These APIs allow the user to specify the character set ID of BFILE data by using a new parameter. The APIs convert the data from the specified BFILE character set into the database character set for CLOBs or the national character set for NCLOBs.

  See Also: "Loading External BFILE Data into LOBs"`

• Generic base letter search

  You can perform a search that ignores case and diacritics.

  See Also: "Performing a Generic Base Letter Search"

• Change in Object Types support for NCHAR datatypes and character semantics

  Object Types now support NCHAR datatypes and character semantics.

  See Also: "Length Semantics" "Summary of Supported Datatypes" Oracle9i Application Developer's Guide - Object-Relational Features