Globalized Application Support
Increase your market presence by offering solutions in any language. SQLBase International Unicode support enables easy worldwide deployment of your solutions. Users can easily work with the language, character set and glyphs they are familiar with regardless of where they are located. The new data type's nchar and long nvarchar allow users to store and retrieve text in Unicode format.
Flexible Local Support
Local support is flexible regardless of how your databases are configured. You might have several local databases in different countries or one centralized database that stores information for several countries. SQLBase International Collation support always sorts and compares the data according to the rules you specify, giving you maximum flexibility in the way you want to retrieve data. You can define local databases that have a collation for a certain language predefined. Queries will then always take the predefined collation into account unless otherwise specified. You can run queries and specify the collation you want to use; the collation specified in a query overruns the collation defined for the database. For example an address table in a database can contain data in US characters, French characters and Japanese characters. You can now query the database for French addresses and have the data sorted with French sort order, or you can query the table for Japanese addresses and have the results sorted in Japanese sorting order. SQLBase International gives you all the power you need to easily manage foreign language application requirements.
Easy Migration to SQLBase International
- Database Migration: SQLBase International includes a database migration tool that makes it easy to migrate existing SQLBase databases to SQLBase International. The migration tool allows you to use command lines to automatically update large deployments, or users can use the graphic user interface and manually convert your existing database to SQLBase International. The conversion tool manages the migration of existing data in ANSI character set format (char, varchar, long varchar) to Unicode format columns (nchar, nvarchar, long nvarchar).
- Application Migration: Migrating applications to SQLBase International is easy and seamless. SQLBase International can be used in conjunction with applications that have been designed for previous versions of SQLBase. Client applications can continue to use SQLBase 9 clients to connect to SQLBase International without the need to change anything in the application or on the client computer. Once the client applications are upgraded to utilize the new Unicode features of SQLBase International, they can start to use the SQLBase International clients.
Easy NLS Migration
Collations now replace the old SQLBase NLS support that used country.sql to define national language sorting orders. Collations are much easier to use and a lot more flexible than the previous NLS support. In SQLBase International, the country specific collations are already predefined in the system and do not require any manual editing to country.sql. Collations are incredibly flexible and allow you to store and retrieve data from one table in different languages and sorting orders. In previous versions the language had to be set centrally for one database server, now with collations the collation can be set at the server level, the database level, the table level, the column level, the session level, and the statement level, giving ultimate flexibility for managing languages at any level appropriately.
With the previous country.sql method every client needed to have the country setting as well. Using SQLBase International there is no need for any client sql.ini settings.
Easy Management, Higher Connect Flexibility
Using SQLBase International you can connect to databases that have the same name on different servers, making it easier to manage all your databases. In order to do this there is now a fourth parameter to the connect command which is the server name.
Example:
Connect island/sysadm/sysadm/server1;Connect island/sysadm/sysadm/server2;(These connect statements would work with the two serverpath entries listed below.)
Using Team Developer you can take advantage of this feature by adding the server name to the password divided by a slash. SQLBase International clients allow multiple serverpath entries in sql.ini that point to databases having the same name.
Example:
Serverpath=server1,192.168.0.11
Serverpath=server2,192.168.0.22
Flexible Text Management and Quick Text Search for Enhanced User Experience
Due to the enhanced indices and column size you can save four times the amount of text (1000 characters) in the new character columns. The increased text size allows the storage of comments and other text blocks in standard or Unicode character columns (varchar, nvarchar). These columns may be fully indexed allowing for very fast text search.
SQLBase International index size is increased to 1000 bytes, allowing for faster search in complex joins in addition to having a much better text search feature.
More Flexibility for Database Design and Query Design
Tables, views and result sets can now have up to 1000 columns. Previous SQLBase versions allowed up to 254 columns per table, view or result set.
Higher SQL Compatibility
SQLBase International provides greater level of SQL compatibility, which means that you need less code that makes a difference between the target databases. Most of the SQL will work with any database - be it SQLBase, Oracle or SQL Server.
- Named Constraints are used in primary and foreign key definitions to define a name for the primary or foreign key definition. Using Named Constraints unique indices are created automatically without the need of manually creating a unique index after having defined a primary key.
- New datatypes for binary data make it easier to handle binary data in SQLBase. In earlier versions binary data could be stored in varchar or long Varchar columns. With SQLBase International, varchar and long Varchar columns can only contain text data. For binary data one should use the new datatypes varbinary and long varbinary. Varbinary and long varbinary can be used to store image information or other binary data.
Higher Security
Password and user name size are increased to a maximum of 36 characters.
Enhanced SQLConsole
SQLConsole offers enhanced functionality due to the new features of SQLBase International. For example, you can now access multiple databases that have the same name by using the new serverpath and connect-string syntax.
It is now easy to manage Server-groups in SQLConsole. You can use Server-groups to create logical groups of servers that are easy to access and manage from the Server-group view in SQLConsole. You can define as many Server-groups as you need and add as many SQLBase servers to one group as necessary.
The configuration of SQLConsole and its instance of the SQLBase server for the SQLConsole database is one hundred percent automatic and requires zero human interaction. SQLConsole uses its own SQLBase configuration file to avoid conflicts with other SQLBase installations.