On database support for multilingual environments

Global e-commerce and mass-outreach e-governance programs have brought into sharp focus the need for database systems to store and manipulate text data efficiently in a suite of natural languages. While some means of storing and querying multilingual data are provided by all current database systems, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no prior study of their functionality or efficiency in this regard. In this paper, we explore the multilingual support needed by the user community and what is currently provided by the popular database systems to satisfy these needs. Specifically, a comparison of multilingual features supported by the database systems is provided against a set of relevant parameters. Initial results from our performance study indicate that serious lacunae exist in the performance with respect to multilingual data. We propose a new data type and associated database system architecture components for making the performance of the database system to be language independent. Results from our initial implementation of the proposed methodology are encouraging indicating the value of such an approach.