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Working with a database can be so easy - as long as you don't need to care about localization or languages with more or other letters than english. One of these Languages is German. And here the problem starts... Introduction Let's look at a simple scenario: Inserting a text with German letters like ä, ö, ü and ß into the Oracle 11g database. And right now there already could be a problem when trying to select it again. So what is the problem here? Actually the problem itself is very simple: The character encoding. However the solution is not as simple. I tried to connect to Oracle via an ODBC connection from Lazarus IDE for inserting german press releases with a lot of Umlauts (äöü). The result in the database was a mess. So how to solute this mess? The "problematic chain" First of all we have to consider that different operating systems have different character sets. Usually current Linux distributions have a Unicode character set in contrast to Windows, u...

Free programming IDEs are a great benefit for everybody who's interested in Programming and for little but ambitious companies. One of these free IDEs is the Lazarus IDE . It's a "clone" of the Delphi IDE by Embarcadero (originally by Borland). But actually Lazarus is much more than a clone: Using the Free Pascal-Compiler , it was platform-independent and cross-compiling since it was started. I am using Lazarus very often - especially for building GUIs easily because Java is still Stone-Age when a GUI is required (though there is a couple of GUI-building tools - they all are much less performant than Delphi / Lazarus). In defiance of all benefits of Lazarus there still is one Problem. Not all Components are designed for use on a 64 bit systems. Considering that 64 bit CPUs are common in ordinary PCs since at least 2008, this is very anpleasant. One of the components which will not be available on 64 bit installations is the TOracleConnection of Lazarus' SQLDB ...