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Migrating Large Scale Applications from ASCII to Unicode?

Posted by Cliff on from the improving-software-without-breaking-it dept.

bobm asks: "We've been asked to migrate our newer applications to Unicode. My biggest issue is that if we start storing user data in unicode we will no longer be able to provide complete updates the legacy (pure ASCII) systems. This is important in that we are currently updating > 25k customers a day and managment does not want that to be affected. I also haven't found a clean way to provide multilanguage data mining that can return a single language output. This doesn't even begin to address issues like data validation and display issues. (note: we currently handle the web pages in multiple language sets but require the data to be in ascii form.) I've spent some time on Unicode.Org but I really haven't found any real world discussions on people doing this on a large scale (>1Tbyte databases)."

3 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. just ignore it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Unicode isn't all it cracked up to be. Stick with Latin-1 and you will have 99% of the important markets. It is wasteful foolishness to ruin good software so that you can accomodate some obscure language with no possibility of the effort actually helping your company's bottom line. Your company is in business to make money. Remember that.

  2. Re:everyone should learn English by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Troll

    Why not stick with the most used languages on the planet then? Chinese or Spanish?

  3. Good news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    for five english pounds, Sarah McLaughlin will get naked!