Sybase 12.4.2 User Manual

CHAPTER 9    International Languages and Character Sets

The equivalence of upper and lower case characters is enforced in the collation. 
There are some collations where particular care may be needed when assuming 
case insensitivity of identifiers.

Example

In the Turkish 857TRK collation, the lower case 

i

 does not have the character 

I

 

as its upper case equivalent. Therefore, despite the case insensitivity of 
identifiers, the following two statements are not equivalent in this collation:

SELECT *

FROM sysdomain

SELECT *

FROM SYSDOMAIN

Both the database server and the client library recognize their language and 
character set environment using a locale definition.

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 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.

For information on enabling character-set translation, see “Starting a database 
server using character set translation” on page 348.

The locale consists of the following components:

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 which language 
library to load.

The client library uses the locale language to determine:

•

Which language library to load.