> The computerized world is constantly moving towards support for
> nationalization. Unicode is spreading. You can now actually use national
> characters in domain names (but you have to back them up with plain
> ASCII versions due to old browsers etc.). Most applications that target
> "normal users" have nationalized versions. Even Delphi comes in three
> language versions and that's a development too.
>
> Why should SQL stay behind?

Well... for one...

In SQL Server, there was this system table INDEXES. It was
defined as "indexes". Guess what happens on a server with a
Turkish collation as the server wide collation?

indexes uppercased becomes ÍNDEXES because the small
character "i" becomes "Í" and not "I".

Now, this means that every metadata name, although defined
as "indexes" (no quotes, not case sensitive) might get messed
up because of national crap.

I say - yet another good reason to keep it to simple ASCII :-D

With regards,

Martijn Tonies
Database Workbench - developer tool for InterBase, Firebird, MySQL & MS SQL
Server
Upscene Productions
http://www.upscene.com