About International Language Data

When you create a database, you specify a collating sequence, or collation, to be used by the database. A collation is a combination of a character set and a sort order for characters in the database.

• International Languages and Character Sets
  Configure your SAP® Sybase® IQ installation to handle international language issues.
• Character sets
  Each piece of software works with a character set. A character set is a set of symbols, including letters, digits, spaces, and other symbols. An example of a character set is ISO-8859-1, also known as Latin1.
• Collations
  A collation describes how to sort and compare characters from a particular character set or encoding. SAP Sybase IQ supports two collation algorithms: the SAP Sybase IQ Collation Algorithm (SACA), and the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA). SACA provides fast, compact, and reasonable sorting at the expense of linguistic correctness. UCA provides linguistic correctness, but with a small expense in storage requirements and execution time.
• Locales
  Both the database server and the client library recognize their language and character set environment using a locale definition.
• Understanding Character Set Translation
  SAP Sybase IQ can perform character set translation among character sets that represent the same characters, but are located at different positions in the character set or code page.