Java Enterprise Best Practices

Configure Your Database for Internationalization

Localization support will vary depending on your database vendor. Typically, you will be interested in knowing which character encodings are supported by your database, as this will affect the type of data that you can store in the database. This setting is usually something that needs to be configured at the database level or upon the creation of tables in a particular database.

Oracle, for example, is typically configured to encode data in tables in UTF-8 encoding. This allows you to store a good number of character sets using this particular encoding. In preparing your database for localization, using UTF-8 as the encoding is, to quote Martha Stewart, “a good thing.” In presenting the data to the user, the data can be converted from UTF-8 to another character encoding for display.

However, what if you happen to be using PostgreSQL? Out of the box, PostgreSQL does not support localization—this must be enabled when the PostgreSQL server is built from the source distribution into compiled binaries. However, one of the limitations of this database is that, to quote the PostgreSQL documentation on localization,^[33] “PostgreSQL uses the standard ISO C and POSIX-like locale facilities provided by the server operating system.” Therefore, to achieve proper localization for your application running over a PostgreSQL database, you must involve the system administrator to install the proper language packages.

Another popular database is MySQL. ...