ABSTRACT:
Database vendors throughout the world are becoming intensely interested
in the prospects of using Unicode. This is because global organisations,
governments, libraries, etc. have a strong need to store, manipulate, and
distribute data that may be in any of multiple languages. This talk will
present an overview of the ways in which several database vendors have
chosen to implement Unicode in the short term, and what some of the long
term prospects may be. The introduction will cover the common issues affecting
all of the vendors, including: technical problems, potential alienation
of the installed customer base, education of management, resource limitations,
and project timing. The body of the talk will discuss actual current implementations
from Oracle, Sybase, ADABAS, NCR (Teradata), IBM (DB2), Microsoft, and
Borland (Interbase). then discuss their various published plans for the
future to support more robust implementations of Unicode. The final part
of the talk will discuss the major stumbling blocks to current progress
and how those are being remedied.
Database vendors are stepping up to the challenge of Unicode data processing,
but the OS providers are needed as well before we see seamless use of multilingual
data becoming commonplace. The good news is that tools are available now
if a developer or organisation has a requirement or desire to use Unicode.
