Unicode is a universal character encoding standard for the interpretation of text for computer processing. Unicode offers a constant way of encoding multilingual plain text. It also helps to exchange text files globally. The Unicode standard provides the capacity to encode all the characters used for the written languages of the world. To keep character coding simple and proficient, the Unicode standard allocates a unique numeric value and name to each character.
The objective behind Unicode was to use a single 16-bit encoding that provides code points for more than 65,000 characters. The code points support characters in major languages of the world. The Unicode Standard incorporates various symbols, such as punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, technical symbols, and arrows.
Types of Unicode Characters
The Unicode characters can be divided in to two basic categories: UTF-8 and UTF-16. Depending upon the requirement, we can select the appropriate format for storage.
Why Unicode Supported Databases?
A Unicode supported database is a database whose character set is set to a Unicode format, such as UTF-8 and UTF-16. All data must be in Unicode format and any data saved to the database must be converted to Unicode data implicitly or explicitly.
Migrating existing applications to support multiple languages can be as simple as changing some configuration parameters of the environment for monolingual support or as involved as modifying the application code to enable Unicode support. The level of complexity depends on the level of globalization support that you want to provide. The eventual goal for globalization is to support Unicode across all tiers of application design structure. This requires considerable changes to the source code of your applications and database schema. In return, it grants a foundation for your applications to be extended so that they can support more languages in the future.
The Unicode support provides an ideal platform to integrate with various technologies, such as JSP, ASP, or PL/SQL.
Daffodil DB fully supports the Unicode encoding standards to globalize your applications.
