Use a customized language environment for your database (GLS)
Global Language Support (GLS) permits you to use different locales. A GLS locale is an environment that has defined conventions for a particular language or culture.
By default, IBM®
Informix® products
use the U.S. English ASCII code set and perform in the U.S. English
environment with ASCII collation order. Set your environment to accommodate
a nondefault locale if you plan to use any of the following functions:
- Non-ASCII characters in the data
- Non-ASCII characters in user-specified object names
- Conformity with the sorting and collation order of a non-default code set
- Culture-specific collation and sorting orders, such as those used in dictionaries or phone books
IBM Informix supports the UTF-8 Unicode locale.
Unlike other locales, UTF-8 enables a single database to store character strings from two or more natural languages that use dissimilar code sets, such as the English, Russian, and Japanese languages.
For descriptions of GLS environment variables and for detailed information about how to implement non-default locales, see the IBM Informix GLS User's Guide.