Question

SQL Collation with support for Japanese

Asked by: YoungBonzi

Hello, I have an SQL Server 2008 database using SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS right now. It seems that Japanese text shows up as question marks...so I was going to change it to Japanese_CI_AS or Japanese_Unicode_CI_AS, but I'm not sure what the differences are, or if these are even the ones I should choose. It's mostly going to be filled with Latin-based text, but there are also some fields that should accept Japanese.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks~

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Asked On
2008-10-16 at 12:59:45ID23821868
Topics

SQL Server 2008

,

SQL Server 2005

,

MS SQL Server

Participating Experts
2
Points
125
Comments
12

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    Answers

     

    by: cs97jjm3Posted on 2008-10-16 at 13:25:43ID: 22735394

    we had this a will ago and the then DBA used http://developer.mimer.com/collations/index.tml

     

    by: YoungBonziPosted on 2008-10-16 at 13:28:34ID: 22735427

    Thank you for the option, but I want to stick with Microsoft technology.

     

    by: mark_willsPosted on 2008-10-17 at 04:03:18ID: 22739253

    Well, unicode is multi-byte and needed for "special" characters. So you will want to change to a unicode basis. That also means making sure datatypes are unicode as well - e.g. instead of varchar, it then becomes nvarchar.

    There is some reasonable documentation about "international considerations [SQL Server]" in books on-line and highly recommend you research that before you change anything.

     

    by: mark_willsPosted on 2008-10-17 at 04:13:11ID: 22739297

    Sorry, might have given the wrong impression there... Have been a bit too brief with some of my answers lately...

    The database collation is not as important as the datatype being unicode and then making sure it "knows" it is dealing with unicode.

    For example... Try this quick example :

    create table tbl_japanese_example_1 (place nvarchar(200))
 
insert tbl_japanese_example_1 values ('ۇ osaka')
 
select * from tbl_japanese_example_1
 
 
create table tbl_japanese_example_2 (place nvarchar(200))
 
insert tbl_japanese_example_2 values (N'ۇ osaka')
 
select * from tbl_japanese_example_2
                                              
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    by: mark_willsPosted on 2008-10-17 at 04:16:37ID: 22739315

    Guess what - this website is not unicode !

     

    by: YoungBonziPosted on 2008-10-20 at 19:10:20ID: 22763962

    Sorry, I haven't been getting any email notifications so I never bothered checking back. Thank you for the solution mark wills, that's good to know about the datatypes.

    What I wound up doing was, in Management Studio, changing the collation on individual datatypes that could possible receive Japanese to the Japanese_Unicode collation (I was unaware this could be done). I noticed that text indeed becomes ntext, and varchar becomes nvarchar. Like you recommend.

    I will probably just leave things as they are, because it's working fine...but are you in fact saying that I don't have to change the collation and just change the datatype?

     

    by: mark_willsPosted on 2008-10-20 at 19:28:03ID: 22764022

    Yes, the collation will change things like sort sequences and such like, and might want to consider the most appropriate collation, but the secrete to handling those wonderful character sets is in being unicode enabled.

     

    by: mark_willsPosted on 2008-10-20 at 19:30:13ID: 22764030

    Oh, and that attachment a couple of postings back does show the database (latin) being able to correctly render Kanji becuase they are unicode data types.

     

    by: YoungBonziPosted on 2008-10-20 at 19:30:21ID: 31506910

    Ahhhhhh...thank you, I wish I'd read your reply earlier.

     

    by: mark_willsPosted on 2008-10-20 at 19:32:29ID: 22764042

    Except the top one should have been just varchar and the second one nvarchar - sorry about that.

     

    by: YoungBonziPosted on 2008-10-20 at 19:32:32ID: 22764043

    Yep, the unicode is preserved. I figured that's what you were showing me...I played it out in my head because I didn't want to execute it on my DB. Still a bit skittish about playing around with it.

    Thanks again~

     

    by: mark_willsPosted on 2008-10-20 at 19:37:06ID: 22764062

    Yep, you got it... and thank you too...

    20120131-EE-VQP-002

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