AIOUG Webinar: When 7-bit ASCII ain’t enough – about NLS, Collation, Charsets, Unicode and such with Kim Berg Hansen

Greetings from All India Oracle Users Group (AIOUG)! We hope everyone at your end including you are safe!

The Covid-19 makes the user group events that are physical gatherings impossible. Over the past weeks, we have been looking at our calendar of events and re-imagining them as virtual web-based events. We have decided to host virtual based sessions every Wednesday. Please mark your calendars and find more details about this week’s webinar.

Session Title: When 7-bit ASCII ain’t enough – about NLS, Collation, Charsets, Unicode and such

Session Abstract:  A-Z in upper and lower case isn’t enough in a global world, you need to support all sorts of textual data. Oracle database can handle most of it, but there are pitfalls to be aware of – even using Unicode that should handle everything. Learn about NLS and collation and converting charactersets.

Session Description: How life as a DB developer would be much easier if the entire world was happy with just A-Z in upper and lower case. But the globalized world is a very diverse place with myriads of special characters and modifiers, different alphabets, writing directions, sorting and comparison rules, and many ways to encode these characters. So, your database and application absolutely need to know about these things and handle them correctly, or you’ll find your app displaying garbage or worse, storing garbage.

Oracle database offers many NLS (National Language Support) settings to handle such globalization on database, instance and session/client level. NLS functions are available in the SQL language to handle specific cases with code when the session settings aren’t granular enough. In Oracle 12.2 was added Collation support, where you specify right down on column level how this column should sort and compare values. You have choices whether to store everything with database characterset UTF8 or stick to a single-byte characterset – in both cases be aware of how conversion takes place if the client is not using the database characterset.

This presentation discusses many of the issues involved and ways to use NLS and Collation to avoid them. Pitfalls will be shown, where you can get mangled (or even invalid) data stored if you are not careful.

Speaker Bio:

Kim Berg Hansen is a database developer from Middelfart in Denmark. Originally wanting to work with electronics, he almost coincidentally tried computer programming and discovered where his talent lay, as the programs he did worked well be unlike the electronics projects he soldered that often failed. After that experience he progressed from Commodore Basic on VIC-20 over Modula-2 and C at Odense University to Oracle SQL and PL/SQL, which last two languages he now has worked with extensively since the year 2000. His professional passion is to work with data inside the database utilizing the SQL language to the fullest to achieve the best application experience for the users.

Kim shares his experience and knowledge by writing the “Practical Oracle SQL” book, blogging, presenting at various Oracle User Group conferences, and being the SQL quizmaster at the Oracle Dev Gym. His motivation is when peers go “now I understand” after his explanations, or when end users “can’t live without” his application coding. He is certified Oracle OCE in SQL as well as awarded Oracle ACE Director. Outside the coding world, Kim is married, loves to cook, and is a card-carrying member of the Danish Beer Enthusiasts association.

Date: 29th July 2020
Time: 2:00 – 3:30 pm IST

Registration Link:
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We are looking at how we can deliver quality content and benefit to our members. We have some ideas including webinars of course but do you have any ideas of what you would like to see the AIOUG doing for you? If so, please get in touch – webinar@aioug.org

Regards,
Team AIOUG
webinar@aioug.org