ASA Database Administration Guide
International Languages and Character Sets
Understanding locales
The application locale, or client locale, is used by the client library when making requests to the database server, to determine the character set in which results should be returned. If character set translation is enabled (the default), the database server compares its own locale with the application locale to determine whether character set translation is needed. Different databases on a server may have different locale definitions.
The locale consists of the following components:
Language The language is a two-character string using the ISO-639 standard values: DE for German, FR for French, and so on. Both the database server and the client have language values for their locale.
The database server uses the locale language to determine the following behavior:
Which language library to load.
The language is used together with the character set to determine which collation to use when creating databases, if no collation is explicitly specified.
The client library uses the locale language to determine the following behavior:
Which language library to load.
Which language to request from the database.
For more information, see Understanding the locale language.
Character set The character set is the code page in use. The client and server both have character set values, and they may differ. If they differ, character set translation may be required to enable interoperability.
For machines that use both OEM and ANSI code pages, the ANSI code page is the value used here.
For more information, see Understanding the locale character set.