I'm developing a windows mobile application which should work in multiple languages (English, German, French, Russian).
This application is about to be shown to customers (Germans, Russians,...) and we would like to generate data depending on the culture it is setup for.
So: has anybody thought of a way to create data which than is about to be inserted into the dbms at runtime?
For example: tha VAT description for the english version reads "VAT 17.5%" with value 17.5, the german version "Mehrwertsteuer 19%" with value 19, the french version "TVA 19.6%" with value 19.6
Thanks in advance
EDIT
I admit i was not very clear. I need a set of data to be localized. I need a mechanism which somehow reads this "prepared" localized data and inserts into the dbms.
A second thought of mine would be to use a XML file which has the same structure for all the languages (but of course different values), e.g
datafile.en-US.xml
datafile.de-DE.xml
What do you think about this?
I don't quite know what is your aim, so I could be mistaken here... Anyway, if you planning to distribute your Windows Mobile client application across various countries and one language version is to work in one country, I would suggest using resource files instead SQL DB. You could put messages like "VAT {0}", "TVA {0}" and format them at runtime (depending on programming language it would look different, please find C#/.Net example below) preserving valid cultural format.
var vat = string.Format(vatPatternStringFromResources, vatValueFromResources.ToString("P")); // "P" means percentage format
If you still need to add VAT value to SQL for reference, you can simply add one decimal column which will hold either foreign key to VAT table or simply VAT value...
Update on different VAT values
The problem is that, VAT values differs not only by countries but also depending on what you purchase... Therefore one need to store them in configurable way... Well, if you want to go with SQL DB, you could use additional VAT table with PK spanned across two columns: one CountryID (FK for Country table) and the second RateID (Integer) both uniquely identifying given VAT rate for the country...
Related
I'm new to SQL and I'm currently thinking about an effective way to build out my database. It's a language learning application and I'm torn between two approaches:
Keeping all of my words, regardless of their language, in one giant words table
Splitting my words into separate tables based on their language, ie: words_french, words_italian, etc.
In the second scenario, are there approaches that I can use (perhaps within Postgres) that would allow me target the words_french table in the event that I'm currently working through french lessons / content and need to lookup associated french words?
I feel like there would be some sort of concat process like so: words_${language} and as of this moment I'd figure i'd have to resolve this within JS or something else on the frontend.
-- also, is breaking words and other content into their respective table_language even a valid approach?
Any ideas?
Use Option 1. Option 2 would be horribly difficult to work with.
Word table:
WordId
Word
Language
1
a
English
2
un
French
As Dimitar Spasovski suggests, if you have a need for additional attributes associated with the language, you should also have a Language table. Then replace the Language column in the Word with LanguageId to make the relationship.
Watching or reading some data modeling or data architecture classes online will help.
I'm working on a problem in which i have to mask/replace (i know they are both different)some data like credit card no,account no,date of birth etc with a particular pattern .
for example if a credit card no. is like 123/456/789 it will show ###/###/### in front end .
The solution i thought is to use regexp_replace function and it's working but the problem is that it's taking to much time and the query is very tedious and is giving a new column for each pattern(need to match more than 75 pattern for only credit card no. and account no.)+ future pattern will also come
Secondly,is it possible that we can creating a table in which we can store all the pattern and reflect to that table using dynamic sql query ??(if we get the table create access)(but i don't know how to do this )
Thirdly,we can use procedure to mask the data(not replace the data with a pattern),generate the random no. for protecting of data.(I don't think so they will agree on this ,the senior members).
if any other optimum solution is there please share,i also don't know that all the credit card no,account no etc reside in one table or they are present in more than one table, if the data is present in more than one table then what will be the solution ??
Detailed explanation needed....
From a design point of view these data points should have been stored in unique columns -- a column for credit card numbers for example. Is that not the structure of this table? If it is, why would you even include that column in your query? If cc numbers, etc. are included with other columns you may want to take the time to re-structure if you plan to use moving forward.
Continued on if they are stored in the same column -- you are really risking a breach of PII by relying on a replace function to remove sensitive information. Consider other options for accessing the data you need so that you don't breach confidential information due to a mistake in data entry.
In the context of my SAP Application I added a column to an existing table and would like to define a default value for it, so that old code working with the table (code that is inserting lines especially) doesn't have to care about the new column - rather I want it to be filled with a predefined default value automatically (only if no value is specified of course).
The DB-system that lies behind is an Oracle-DB, though I have only access to it through the SAP-GUI and the ABAP-SQL.
As our company expert for SAP did not know if this is possible I thought maybe someone here would. So - is this possible and if it is - how?
Edit - Requested Scenario details:
The scenario is actually very simple: We have a users-table for our application containing the standard user stuff (name, some setting, Ids, division, a bunch of flags and so on), and I added a column to store a simple setting (the design the user has chosen for his webinterface). It contains simply a name (char 40). That's the column I talked about above and I want the default value for it to be let's say "Default Design".
Please, don't even think about doing this on a database level. Seriously. Changes made to the database layer directly will not be visible inside the system and lead to all kinds of strange side effects that will be a nightmare to support. Besides, your changes won't be picked up by the Change and Transport System - you'd have to update the QA and Production systems manually.
If possible, I'd recommend to choose your domain values in a way that the neutral field value (spaces, zero, whatever) corresponds to your default value. If this is not possible, please describe your scenario in detail to get a more specific answer.
The SAP R/3 / ABAP environment does not give you the option of adding default values for a column. You can only choose to force the system to fill the non-NULL default values when adding a column, but this is usually a bad idea. It takes time to modify all the data and insert the default values, and depending on the table size and criticality, this can lead to a production outage. Filling the fields with default values has to be performed by the application server, not the database. In your case, I'd just add the logic in the read-access module, something like
IF my_user-ze_design IS INITIAL.
my_user-ze_design = co_ze_default_design.
ENDIF.
You can define default values for columns added to tables - and if your DB is Oracle 11g (or later), Oracle introduced "Dictionary Only Add Column", which means the default value metadata is stored only in the dictionary - so existing records do not need to be updated with the default value and there is no overhead, no matter how large the table.
I have a business requirement where we need to do somce crazy name matching against records stored in the database and I was wondering if there is any easy way to do it using SQL Server.
Name Stored in the DB : Austin K
Name to be Matched from UI : Austin Kierland
That's just a sample. In reality, there could be whole lot of different permutations and combinations.
If it's other way round, I could've used wild character but in this case, the name in the database is smaller than the search criteria.
Any suggestions?
Realistically - no. Databases were meant for comparing absolute values, not for messy comparisons. The way they store their data internally just isn't fit for really messy matching. Actually even a superpowerful dedicated search engine like Google, that has a LOT of messy matching features, wouldn't be able to pull off your example without prior knowledge.
I don't know how the requirement is precisely worded, but I'd either shoot the feature request with "technically impossible", or implement a rule set for which messy matches are tried - for your example, you could easily 'hard code' that multiple searches are executed when capitalized words are entered, shortening them so a single letter. No idea if that's a solution to your problem though.
You can do a normal search using the LIKE operator which determines whether a specific character string matches a specified pattern. The problem you will run into is the probability of the returning of multiple records or incorrect people. I've had similar requirement myself for a business app and the best solution to the issue is to require other qualifying values rather then just name. If you do a partial name search without other qualifying data you are certainly going to come across the false positive matches and/or multiple records. In my case I built a web service that checks eligibility allowing text search for first & last name but also added date of birth, primary person SSN, and gender which ensured the matching person was in deed the person intended to search for. If my situation was like yours in which name was the only search criteria my recommendation to the business would be we cannot perform the search until qualifying data is entered into the database otherwise there is no accurate way to query the results they are looking for.
Say that I needed to share a database with a partner. Obviously I have customer information in that database. Short of going through and identifying every column that contains privacy information and a custom script to 'scrub' the data, is there any tool or script which can scrub the data, but keep the format in tact (for example, if a string is 5 characters, it would stay 5 characters, only scrubbed)?
If not, how would you accomplish something like this, preferably in TSQL?
You may consider only share VIEW, create VIEWs to hide data that you don't want share.
Example:
CREATE VIEW v_customer
AS
SELECT
NAME,
LEFT(CreditCard,5) + '****' As CreditCard -- OR, don't show this column at all
....
FROM customer
Firstly I need to state professional interest I work for IBM which has tools that do exactly this.
Step 1. Ensure you identify all the PII (Personally Identifiable Information). When sharing database information it is typical that the obvious column names like "name" are found but you also need to find the "hidden" data where either the data is embedded in a standard format eg string-name-string and column name is something like "reference code" or is in free format text fields . as you have seen this is not going to be an easy job unless you automate it. The Tool for this is InfoSphere Discovery
Step 2. What context does the "scrubbed" data need to be in. Changing named fields to random characters has problems when testing as users focus on text errors rather than functional failures, therefore change names to real but ficticious. Credit card information often needs to be "valid". by that I mean it needs to have a valid prefix say 49XX but the rest an invalid sequence. Finally you need to ensure that every instance of the change is propogated through the database to maintain consistency. Tool for this is Optim Test Data Management with Data Privacy option.
The two tools integrate to give a full data privacy solution.
Based on the original question, it seems you need the fields to be the same length, but not in a "valid" format? How about:
UPDATE customers
SET email = REPLICATE('z', LEN(email))
-- additional fields as needed
Copy/paste and rename tables/fields as appropriate. I think you're going to have a hard time finding a tool that's less work, unless your schema is very complicated, or my formatting assumptions are incorrect.
I don't have an MSSQL database in front of me right now, but you can also find all of the string-like columns by something like:
SELECT *
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE DATA_TYPE IN ('...', '...')
I don't remember the exact values you need to compare for, but if you run the query and see what's there, they should be pretty self-explanatory.