Target Audience: Software Engineer

Level of Session: Intermediate

Oracle Internet Directory (OID) is an industry standard Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) Version 3 service that combines the mission critical strength of Oracle's database technology with the flexibility and compatibility of the LDAP directory standard.

Since directory services are for global use in nature, LDAP Servers have to store and search directory entries of many languages. Unicode is the only solution here.

Oracle implemented its LDAP Server on the high performance Oracle8i database with UTF-8 encoded character set. It can handle hundreds of millions of directory entries in tens of different languages.

In this paper, we give an overview of Oracle Internet Directory's internationalization architecture. OID uses UTF-8 to store directory entries into Oracle8i database. It also uses UTF-8 to communicate with LDAP client over the network. Oracle also supports various tools for LDAP Server's administration. For the administration tools to be used in the environment where UCS-2 or UTF-8 is available, we use these encodings. Oracle supports numerous platforms on which neither of these encodings are supported by the operating systems. Oracle8i database and LDAP Server can still handle UTF-8 on such systems, but we need to use operating system's encoded character set for administration tools' user interface. Conversions between UTF-8 and operating system's encoded character set are necessary in such environments. Oracle supports nearly 200 encoded character sets, and we can convert LDAP Server's UTF-8 data to and from operating system's encoded character set for LDAP Server's administration tools.