Understanding a GLS Locale

In a client/server environment, both the database server and the client application must know which language the data is in to be able to process the application data correctly. A GLS locale is a set of Informix files that bring together the information about data that is specific to a given culture, language, or territory. In particular, a GLS locale can specify the following:

• The name of the code set that the application data uses
• The classification of the characters in the code set
• The collation (sorting) sequence to use for character data
• The end user format for monetary, numeric, date and time data

IBM Informix products use the following GLS files to obtain locale-related information. For more information, see Appendix A. Managing GLS Files.

Each database is limited to a single locale, but different databases of the same database server can support different locales.

A single database can store character data from two or more languages that require different character sets by using the open-source International Components for Unicode (ICU) implementation of the Unicode code set (UTF-8). This code set is available in GLS database server locales for many languages and territories. (Locales for some client-side systems also support the ICU code set UTF-8, as well as the ICU code sets UTF-16 and UTF-32.)