Introduction to 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.

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

The locale consists of the following components: