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Well, I have a table with an Arabic column which may contain variant forms of the same word in multiple rows, for example the word "أسمى" might be in the following forms:

  1. with diacritics: "أَسْمَى";

  2. with changing the last letter of "ى" into "ي" so it would be like "أسمي";

  3. with kashida or "ـ" in some part of the word so it would possibly be "أسمــى";

  4. with variant forms of alef hamza (أ - إ - ا - ء), so it might be "اسمى" or "إسمى";

  5. any combination of the former cases, i.e diacritics and kashida.

I'm looking for a way to store these values in the database (actually I need a solution for SQL Server and another one for Oracle), and to retrieve them regardless of these differences.

I found that I should use an Arabic collation like this Arabic_CI_AI but this collation only helped me in sorting out the problems #1 and #2.

In addition I considered using a fulltext index on the column, but this has its drawbacks and it doesn't provide a full solution.

How can I resolve this?

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    In a dev environment like .NET remove the diacritics and store the value in a search column. stackoverflow.com/questions/249087/…
    – paparazzo
    Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 12:37
  • thanks Paparazzi, but I'm aware of this. this has the drawback of loosing the exact words, while my situation requires that I should maintain the original text as is, in addition to the search capability. and using a search column would double the required storage
    – Creative_0Q
    Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 12:42
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    @Creative_Q - Paparazzi means add an additional column to store the simplified form of each word, and use that for the search function only.
    – Hannah Vernon ♦
    Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 13:43
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    well, yes, of course it would. @Paparazzi offered that as a solution to your problem, he didn't say it wouldn't take extra storage.
    – Hannah Vernon ♦
    Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 14:10
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    You could consider changing collations. In the past (for Greek) I've stored the exact data under Latin1_General_100_CS_AS and then had another "searchable" column with Latin1_General_100_CI_AI which ignores case and accents. Arabic_CS_AI and Arabic_CI_AI exist
    – swasheck
    Commented Oct 12, 2018 at 16:21

1 Answer 1

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Not sure but based on my understanding, this is related to the language/character set.

I use Oracle database and I do store arabic values within the database.

The character set I use is UTF8, I have also tried storing the different examples provided for the same word and I see it working fine.

I am sure SQL Server also supports such character set.

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