How Locales Work

Locales, categories, and conventions have important distinctions that are important to know about.

Before you attempt to create new locales, you need to know a bit more about how InfoSphere® DataStage® defines Locales.

It is important to distinguish between a locale, a category, and a convention.

• A locale comprises a set of categories.
• A category comprises a set of conventions.
• A convention is a rule describing how data values are input or displayed.

In NLS each locale comprises five categories:

• Time
• Numeric
• Monetary
• Ctype
• Collate

Each category comprises various conventions specific to the type of data in each category.

For example, conventions in the Time category include the names of the days of the week, the strings used to indicate AM or PM, the character that separates the hours, minutes, and seconds, and so forth. You can view this information using the NLS Administration tool: