With the Internet, traditionally local companies become global entities overnight. Global organizations, when implementing an intranet solution, must then deal with cross-cultural business rules, heterogeneous data encodings, and multiple scripts for the representation and manipulation of data. When databases are connected to the Web they may use different character set encodings, and different database vendors use different proprietary protocols to ascertain or communicate the encoding being used. From a systems analyst's point of view, this can quickly become a nightmare of conflicting standards, cultures, scripts, and tongues. By systematically breaking the various components down to their atomic elements, one can find commonalities, as well as areas for normalization of data and protocols.
All implementations use at least one data encoding.
Sybase is actively pursuing the Internet marketplace by providing database, connectivity, applets, multimedia, and developer tools. After analyzing the problems presented above, Sybase came to realize that an integral part of the global solution is to provide powerful codeset conversion tools. This paper will present these problems, with an analysis and a look at solutions being implemented by Sybase and other database and systems providers.