System Language and Charset

When you're creating a new local server (or a database for a local server) it's required that you specify the System language and charset. Choose the language and charset that you want the server to use for its internal sorting, comparing, changing character case and similar operations with identifiers.

The choice of national language and charset is important, if you use national characters in identifiers (object names, variable identifiers etc.). The choice of charset (languages with the win suffix - Win CP1250 for East-European languages, Win CP1252 for West-European languages; languages with the ISO suffix - ISO-8859-2 for East-European languages, ISO-8859-1 for West-European languages) is essential for the used operating system (don't use win charsets on Linux and ISO charsets on Windows). ASCII charset is used for English - in this case no special characters are allowed in identifiers. Only 8-bit coding can be used.

SQL server expects commands in the selected coding.

SQL server expects string input parameters (in API functions) in the selected coding.

The selection of system language doesn't affect the language used in the tables data - even in the ASCII database you may have character strings in some table's records containing various national characters (on the other hand, the column names cannot!).

Object definitions are converted into the UTF-8 format when exporting them into files, and back into the appropriate 8-bit coding when importing (or even into a different coding than the one of the exported database). Importing objects with special characters into an ASCII database will result in an error.

Once the system language is set it cannot be changed.

Linux and Locale

If the required charset cannot be selected on Linux, e.g. ISO-8859-2 (the dialog does not provide it), it is possible using the localedef or locale-gen command to create relevant locale and then check it using locale -a.

The program checks presence of the following locales: cs_CZ.ISO-8859-2, pl_PL.ISO-8859-2, fr_FR.ISO-8859-1, de_DER.ISO-8859-1, it_IT.ISO-8859-1, cs_CZ.CP1250, pl_PL.CP1250, fr_FR.CP1252, de_DER.CP1252, it_IT.CP1252.

Creating a Database

Database

System Tables