ASA Database Administration Guide
  International Languages and Character Sets
    International language and character set tasks

Configuring your character set environment

This section describes how to set up your computing environment so that character set issues are handled properly. If you set your locale environments properly, then you do not need to explicitly choose collations for your databases, and you can turn off character set translation between client and server.

For more information about turning off character set translation, see Turning off character set translation on a database server.

To configure your character set environment

1. Determine the default locale of each computing platform in your environment. The default locale is the character set and language of each computer. On Windows operating systems, the character set is the ANSI code page.

   For more information about how to find locale information, see Determining locale information.

2. Decide whether the locale settings are appropriate for your environment.

   For more information, see Understanding collations.

3. If the default settings are inappropriate, decide on a character set, language, and database collation that matches your data and avoids character set translation.

   For more information, see Avoiding character-set translation.

4. Set locales on each of the machines in the environment to these values.

   For more information, see Setting locales.

5. Create your database using the default collation. If the default collation does not match your needs, create a database using a named collation.

   For more information, see Creating a database with a named collation, and Changing a database from one collation to another.

When choosing the collation for your database,

• Choose a collation that uses a character set and sort order appropriate for the data in the database. It is often the case that there are several alternative collations that meet this requirement, including some that are OEM collations and some that are ANSI collations.

• There is a performance cost, as well as extra complexity in system configuration, when you use character set translation. Choose a collation that avoids the need for character set translation.

  You can avoid character set translation by using a collation sequence in the database that matches the character set in use on your client machine operating system. In the case of Windows operating systems on the client machine, choose the ANSI character set. Character set translation is enabled by default for database servers that are version 8.0 or higher of Adaptive Server Anywhere. You can turn off character set translation using the -ct- option.

  For more information, see Avoiding character-set translation.