Configuring Your Character Set Environment

Set up your computing environment so that character set issues are handled properly.

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.
2. Decide whether the locale settings are appropriate for your environment.
3. If the default settings are inappropriate, decide on a character set, language, and database collation that match your data and avoid character set translation.
4. Set locales on each of the machines in the environment to these values.
5. Create your database using the default collation. If the default collation does not match your needs, create a database using a named collation.
6. When choosing the collation for your database, consider the following:
   1. 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.
   2. Choose a collation that avoids the need for character set translation. There is a performance cost, as well as extra complexity in system configuration, when you use 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 Sybase IQ database servers that are version 15.3 or higher. You can turn off character set translation using the CharSet=none on the command line.