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Hello!
My client has a need to be able to store Japanese characters in their
PeopleSoft database. So we need to change the character set from from
Latin1_General (1252) to Japanese character set (932) on SQL Server
2000 Enterprise. I have 2 questions:

1) I would like to know if in SQL Server, the character set is machine
specific or is it defined at the database instance level?
2) Can multiple installs of SQL Server co-exist on a single server with
different default character sets?

Thanks

Vishal

Vishal (vverma2@gmail.com) writes:
> My client has a need to be able to store Japanese characters in their
> PeopleSoft database. So we need to change the character set from from
> Latin1_General (1252) to Japanese character set (932) on SQL Server
> 2000 Enterprise. I have 2 questions:
>
> 1) I would like to know if in SQL Server, the character set is machine
> specific or is it defined at the database instance level?
> 2) Can multiple installs of SQL Server co-exist on a single server with
> different default character sets?

First, you did not say which version of SQL Server you are using. The
answer is not same for SQL 7 and SQL 2000.

On SQL 7, you can only have one single sortorder - and a sortorder implies
a character set - on the server.

On SQL 2000, you can have multiple collations - as the terminolgy is on
SQL 2000 - on the same same server. In fact, every column have its own
collation. Thus, in theory you could create the PeopleSoft database to
use a suitable collation. Problem is if Peoplesoft does make use of
temp tables, in which case you will get collation conflicts when you
join temp tables with regular tables. Use of temp tables is quite common...

So in practice you is likely to have to change the collation for tempdb,
and that means that you have to rebuild the master database. (And this is
about as close as reinstallation of SQL Server you can come.) If you are
setting up a new server for PeopleSoft, this is not much of an issue anyway.

If you have several instances of SQL Server running on the same box,
they can use completely different collations, they are entirely
independent of each other.

Now, whether PeopleSoft supports the Japanese stuff, I don't know, but
I assume you've sorted that out with PeopleSoft already.

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinf...2000/books.asp