OpenROAD 6.0
Businesses now are required to comply with standards and integrate Unicode-based technologies such as Java. Today’s applications must support different character encodings like ASCII, Latin-1, Windows 1252, or UTF-8. Most encodings can represent only a few languages, but UTF-8 handles any language, including Chinese, French, or Arabic.
OpenROAD 6.0, the latest version, available only on Windows, enables OpenROAD developers to enhance their applications to meet these new business requirements. The functionality provided with OpenROAD 6.0 will be available on UNIX/Linux in a future release.
New Features
Internationalized Applications
OpenROAD 6.0 provides transparent Unicode support, enabling applications to handle single-byte, multi-byte, and UTF-8 data with little or no changes to existing code.
What this means in practice is that there’s no need to modify your OpenROAD application data types, but you will need to move to a Unicode enabled database and may need to change your schema data types (DDL). Although it is not necessary, it is usually a good idea to convert the DDL to use the Unicode types such as nvarchar even if you will be using Ingres as the backend RDBMS. The conversion of the schema is mandatory for use with Enterprise Access, so if your solution runs against multiple databases, changing the DDL in all cases makes for consistency.
OpenROAD 6.0 offers the flexibility to support a single language per OpenROAD application (multi-byte) or multiple languages per OpenROAD application. If you need to support multiple languages in the same OpenROAD application, you must use the II_CHARSET setting of UTF8 for the DBMS Server and all clients.
New Data Types Supported
OpenROAD 6.0 adds support for the Unicode data types nchar and nvarchar. Support for large integers is also provided with integer8 support.
New Functions Supported
OpenROAD 6.0 now supports many functions introduced with Ingres releases after version 2.6 and previously available only within SQL statements.
New SQL Statements Supported
OpenROAD 6.0 supports many new SQL statements introduced with Ingres releases after version 2.6.
More Information
For additional information about new features and enhancements to existing functionality available review the OpenROAD 6.0 Release Summary at http://docs.actian.com/openroad/6.0/release-summary.