Search Engine Q&A #11: How to design a global-ready database?


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):



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

2 thoughts on “Search Engine Q&A #11: How to design a global-ready database?

  1. Hi Paul,

    Localisation (localization :-)) support is important. I was very disappointed to see the new DMF has non-localizable messages, etc. when setting up policies, etc. How does this get through internal product review today?

    Regards,

    Greg

  2. I hear you. As part of the new Engineering process that was widely discussed, there were a set of ‘fundamentals’ – including globalization – that provided guidelines, reviews etc. Some were more successful than others – I owned the Supportability one.

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