Multilingual database configuration

If you intend to manage multilingual data like special chars and formats, obviously your DBMS and DB must be configured to handle them. Your DB could have been created with a simple locale configuration and could not permit special chars like diacritics, UTF-8 representations and so. In many DBMSes the locale options for DBs are defined at the creation of the DB. Consult your DBA if you find problems at this point.

For example, in Oracle you can check if your DB is created with multilingual support with this command, and the values that are correct are shown below:

select * from nls_database_parameters where parameter like '%CHARACTERSET'

NLS_CHARACTERSET    AL32UTF8
NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET    UTF8

In many others, like MySql, UTF-8 should be the default character set defined at creation time of the DB.