International Considerations for Databases and Database Engine Applications

SQL Server 2005 supports the storage and manipulation of multilingual data throughout the SQL Server 2005 Database Engine. Features include Unicode data types and other special encodings, date and time data types, and collations for sorts and comparisons.

In This Section

Topic Description

Writing International Transact-SQL Statements

Provides guidelines for making Transact-SQL statements more portable between languages, especially when performing operations with dates.

Working with Unicode Data

Explains the Unicode data types, the benefits of using Unicode, and how to program database applications that use Unicode.

Working with Special Character Encodings

Explains SQL Server 2005 support for supplementary characters and GB18030 characters.

Using Date and Time Data

Explains the datetime and smalldatetime data types for working with date and time data.

Working with Collations

Explains the types of collations in SQL Server 2005, collation architecture, and how to work with collations.