Graham Rhind pleaded:
> It is very
> depressing for users such as myself in Europe that even after all these
> years it is still impossible for us to take a database of names from two
> neighbouring countries and merge them because database software assigns a
> single code page to the tables and this cannot represent all the characters
> needed.
>
> Please tell me I'm wrong ......
>
You are wrong. There are databases available now which support UTF-8
and/or 16-bit Unicode (UTF-16). If you create a UTF-8 database, you can
then merge in your two independent tables of names from two neighboring
countries (presumably from databases running with different code pages),
and end up with a single database which contains all the information.
Sybase, Oracle, Teradata, and ADABAS can all do that now.
You may not yet be able to do that with a cheap, end-user oriented
database such as MS Access, but even such products are being upgraded
to understand UTF-8 and UTF-16.
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:36 EDT