Assumptions about your locale

IBM® Informix® products can support many languages, cultures, and code sets. All the information related to character set, collation and representation of numeric data, currency, date, and time that is used by a language within a given territory and encoding is brought together in a single environment, called a Global Language Support (GLS) locale.

The IBM Informix OLE DB Provider follows the ISO string formats for date, time, and money, as defined by the Microsoft OLE DB standards. You can override that default by setting an Informix environment variable or registry entry, such as GL_DATE.

If you use Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) in your Informix environment, note that the protocols (SNMPv1 and SNMPv2) recognize only English code sets. For more information, see the topic about GLS and SNMP in the IBM Informix SNMP Subagent Guide.

The examples in this publication are written with the assumption that you are using one of these locales: en_us.8859-1 (ISO 8859-1) on UNIX platforms or en_us.1252 (Microsoft 1252) in Windows environments. These locales support U.S. English format conventions for displaying and entering date, time, number, and currency values. They also support the ISO 8859-1 code set (on UNIX and Linux) or the Microsoft 1252 code set (on Windows), which includes the ASCII code set plus many 8-bit characters such as é and ñ.

You can specify another locale if you plan to use characters from other locales in your data or your SQL identifiers, or if you want to conform to other collation rules for character data.

For instructions about how to specify locales, additional syntax, and other considerations related to GLS locales, see the IBM Informix GLS User's Guide.