Establishing a Database Connection

When a client application requests a connection to a database, the database server uses GLS locales to perform the following steps:

1. Examine the client locale information that the client passes.
2. Verify that it can establish a connection between the client application and the database that it requested.
3. Determine the server-processing locale, which the database server uses to handle locale-specific information for the connection.

Sending the Client Locale

When the client application requests a connection, it sends the following environment variables from the client locale to the database server:

• Locale information
  • CLIENT_LOCALE
    If CLIENT_LOCALE is not set, the client sets it to the default locale.
  • DB_LOCALE
    If DB_LOCALE is not set, the client does not send a DB_LOCALE value to the database server.
• User-customized end-user formats
  • Date and time end-user formats: GL_DATE and GL_DATETIME
  • Monetary end-user formats: DBMONEY

  If you do not set any of these environment variables, the client application does not send them to the database server, and the database server uses the end-user formats that the CLIENT_LOCALE defines.

The database server uses these settings to extract the following information:

• How are numeric and monetary values formatted?
• How are dates and times formatted?
• What database locale does the client expect?

The database server uses this information to verify the database locale and to establish the server-processing locale.

Verifying the Database Locale

To open an existing database, the client application must correctly identify the database locale for that database. To verify the database locale, the database server compares the following two locales:

• The locale specified by DB_LOCALE that the client application sends
• The database locale that is stored in the system catalog of the database that the client application requests

  For more information, see The Database Locale.

Two database locales match if their language, territory, code set, and any locale modifiers are the same. If these database locales do not match, the database server performs the following actions:

• It sets the eighth character field of the SQLWARN array in the SQL Communications Area (SQLCA structure) to