ASA Database Administration Guide
International Languages and Character Sets
Understanding character set translation
There is a performance cost associated with character set translation. If you can set up an environment such that no character set translation is required, then you do not have to pay this cost, and your setup is simpler to maintain.
If you work with a single-byte character set and are concerned only with seven-bit ASCII characters (values 0 through 127), then you do not need character set translation. Even if the code pages are different in the database and on the client operating system, they are compatible over this range of characters. Many English-language installations meet these requirements. In Adaptive Server Anywhere 9.0 and higher, character set translation is turned on by default. You can turn it off using the -ct- option.
For more information, see Turning off character set translation on a database server.
If you do require the use of extended characters, there are other steps you may be able to take:
If the code page on your client machine operating system matches that used in the database, no character set translation is needed for data in the database.
For example, in many environments it is appropriate to use the 1252LATIN1 collation in your database, which corresponds to the ANSI code page in many single-byte environments.
If you are able to use a version of Adaptive Server Anywhere built for your language, and if you use the code page on your operating system, no character set translation is needed for database messages. The character set used in the Adaptive Server Anywhere message strings is as follows:
| Language | Character set |
|---|---|
| English | cp1252 |
| French | cp1252 |
| German | cp1252 |
| Japanese | cp932 (Shift-JIS) |
Also, recall that client/server character set translation takes place by default. You can turn it off using the -ct- option.
For more information, see -ct server option.