Chapter 34. Localization

Table of Contents

34.1.1. Overview
34.1.2. Benefits
34.1.3. Problems

34.2.1. Supported Character Sets
34.2.2. Setting the Character Set
34.2.3. Automatic Character Set Conversion Between Server and Client
34.2.4. Further Reading

This chapter describes the available localization features from the point of view of the administrator. EnterpriseDB supports localization with two approaches:

Using the locale features of the operating system to provide locale-specific collation order, number formatting, translated messages, and other aspects.
Providing a number of different character sets defined in the EnterpriseDB server, including multiple-byte character sets, to support storing text in all kinds of languages, and providing character set translation between client and server.

34.1. Locale Support

Locale support refers to an application respecting cultural preferences regarding alphabets, sorting, number formatting, etc. EnterpriseDB uses the standard ISO C and POSIX locale facilities provided by the server operating system. For additional information refer to the documentation of your system.

34.1.1. Overview

Locale support is automatically initialized when a database cluster is created using initdb. initdb will initialize the database cluster with the locale setting of its execution environment by default, so if your system is already set to use the locale that you want in your database cluster then there is nothing else you need to do. If you want to use a different locale (or you are not sure which locale your system is set to), you can instruct initdb exactly which locale to use by specifying the --locale option. For example:

initdb --locale=sv_SE

This example sets the locale to Swedish (sv) as spoken in Sweden (SE). Other possibilities might be en_US (U.S. English) and fr_CA (French Canadian). If more than one character set can be useful for a locale then the specifications look like this: cs_CZ.ISO8859-2. What locales are available under what names on your system depends on what was provided by the operating system vendor and what was installed.

Occasionally it is useful to mix rules from several locales, e.g., use English collation rules but Spanish messages. To support that, a set of locale subcategories exist that control only a certain aspect of the localization rules.

`LC_COLLATE`	String sort order
`LC_CTYPE`	Character classification (What is a letter? The upper-case equivalent?)
`LC_MESSAGES`	Language of messages
`LC_MONETARY`	Formatting of currency amounts
`LC_NUMERIC`	Formatting of numbers
`LC_TIME`	Formatting of dates and times

The category names translate into names of initdb options to override the locale choice for a specific category. For instance, to set the locale to French Canadian, but use U.S. rules for formatting currency, use initdb --locale=fr_CA --lc-monetary=en_US.

If you want the system to behave as if it had no locale support, use the special locale C or POSIX.

The nature of some locale categories is that their value has to be fixed for the lifetime of a database cluster. That is, once initdb has run, you cannot change them anymore. LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE are those categories. They affect the sort order of indexes, so they must be kept fixed, or indexes on text columns will become corrupt. EnterpriseDB enforces this by recording the values of LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE that are seen by initdb. The server automatically adopts those two values when it is started.

The other locale categories can be changed as desired whenever the server is running by setting the run-time configuration variables that have the same name as the locale categories (see Section 30.4.11.2 for details). The defaults that are chosen by initdb are actually only written into the configuration file postgresql.conf to serve as defaults when the server is started. If you delete the assignments from postgresql.conf then the server will inherit the settings from the execution environment.

Note that the locale behavior of the server is determined by the environment variables seen by the server, not by the environment of any client. Therefore, be careful to configure the correct locale settings before starting the server. A consequence of this is that if client and server are set up to different locales, messages may appear in different languages depending on where they originated.

Note: When we speak of inheriting the locale from the execution environment, this means the following on most operating systems: For a given locale category, say the collation, the following environment variables are consulted in this order until one is found to be set: LC_ALL, LC_COLLATE (the variable corresponding to the respective category), LANG. If none of these environment variables are set then the locale defaults to C.
Some message localization libraries also look at the environment variable LANGUAGE which overrides all other locale settings for the purpose of setting the language of messages. If in doubt, please refer to the documentation of your operating system, in particular the documentation about gettext, for more information.

To enable messages translated to the user's preferred language, NLS must have been enabled at build time. This choice is independent of the other locale support.

34.1.2. Benefits

Locale support influences in particular the following features:

Sort order in queries using ORDER BY
The to_char family of functions

The only severe drawback of using the locale support in EnterpriseDB is its speed. So use locales only if you actually need them.

34.1.3. Problems

If locale support doesn't work in spite of the explanation above, check that the locale support in your operating system is correctly configured. To check what locales are installed on your system, you may use the command locale -a if your operating system provides it.

Check that EnterpriseDB is actually using the locale that you think it is. LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE settings are determined at initdb time and cannot be changed without repeating initdb. Other locale settings including LC_MESSAGES and LC_MONETARY are initially determined by the environment the server is started in. You can check the LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE settings of a database using the SHOW command.

The directory src/test/locale in the source distribution contains a test suite for EnterpriseDB's locale support.

Client applications that handle server-side errors by parsing the text of the error message will obviously have problems when the server's messages are in a different language. Authors of such applications are advised to make use of the error code scheme instead.