Different character sets in a database

What happens to arabic or greek characters?

[louponne]

I need to put a database on-line that will offer input of text by users from many countries, including several where different alphabets are used. Arabic and Greek. What are the issues here?

If users type text in Arabic on their arabic keyboards, for example, will it get entered into the database normally? To whom will it be visible? Everyone? Everyone with a system using certain OS's?

I usually use MySQL/PHP.

Thanks to anyone who can help with this one!

[heini]

Louponne - I'm by far not an expert here, hope someone familiar with internationalisation and databases will jump in.

One thing though is clear: you will not be able to use mysql here. While mysql is able to handle a lot of different character sets, it can handle only one set at a time.
So I think unicode would be the solution, but the swedish company developing mysql has announced unicode implementation only for mysql4.1.

I think the main objective will be to find a database able to deal with unicode.

Anybody?

<added>Frontbase works on Unicode, there's a free version</added>
<also_added>interesting resource: http://rf.net/~james/perli18n.html [rf.net]</also_added>

[skirril]

I think Postgresql is one of the solutions, it does implement all of sql92 and 95, and most of the sql99 standard, does unicode (UTF-7,UTF-8) and loads of other nice things.

Drawback: its quite a bit slower than mysql (also does transactions, etc.)...

Skirril

[Woz]

louponne,

I put together an Access database some time ago in English and Chinese. I found I had to build the database using English Access running on Chinese Windows to get both En & Ch in there. Once it was built it would run on both OSs but I would only edit it on the CHinese OS. Mind you, this was some time ago in Internet Years so I am sure things have changed since.

So while some databases will be able to handle Unicode, I am wondering if you will run into any challenges with other Language Codes. Interesting challenge. Have you had any further developements?

Onya
Woz