This kind of follows on from my previous post about making sure you have character column lengths that can handle data from different countries (e.g. city names that may be longer in one country than another). A question on the forums today asked what info there is available to help in designing a global-ready database.

It turns out that there's a wealth of information right there under your nose - type in 'globalization' in the Index of Books Online. It'll get you to a section titled 'International Considerations for SQL Server' that has a link to a sub-section for every component of SQL Server! Very impressive. For instance, the one for the Database Engine has everything you need (I've made these links to the latest online BOL entries on MSDN):

• Writing International T-SQL Statements
• Working with Unicode Data
• Working with Special Character Encodings
• Using Date and Time Data
• Working with Collations

Check it out and save yourself some pain when your database/application suddenly needs to support customers outside your home country.