Db for multilanguage

[mehrdadc48]

Hi, I'm developing a multilanguage web site.(My DB is SQL Server 2008 R2) Some of its languages are: Chinease, Japanesae, Arabic, Persian, English .... I know about some collation and datatypes in SqlServer, but I'm ambigious about Collation of DB and about char types. 1. What collation I shoud use for my DB? 2. for char types I shoud use varchar or nvarchar? Thanks for your attention.

Best wishes

[Lost User]

Mixing cultures in a database are a recipe for severe headache's.

mehrdadc48 wrote:

What collation I shoud use for my DB?

The appropriate one for the required sort-method (binary or dictionary? case sensitive, or not?) for the language, they're listed here[^].

mehrdadc48 wrote:

for char types I shoud use varchar or nvarchar?

NVARCHAR, NTEXT and/or NCHAR. Important note;

Windows Unicode-only collations can only be used with the COLLATE clause to apply collations
to the nchar, nvarchar, and ntext data types on column-level and expression-level data; they
cannot be used with the COLLATE clause to change the collation of a database or server instance.

Says so here[^]. That page also mentions that there's three different levels where you can manage your collations. I'd like to suggest that you append the collation that's required by the current UI to the query. Are you also going to store dates from regions where they speak those languages? If that's the case, you'd also need to check whether the datatimes in the database are all stored in the same timezone (using server-time!) or the local users' time. The latter should be entered in the database re-adjusted to the timezone of your server, or, alternatively, stored the timezoneinformation in an accompanying field. That should be enough to get you up and running. Enjoy :)

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