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

Locale support is automatically initialized when a Greenplum Database system is initialized. The initialization utility, gpinitsystem, will initialize the Greenplum array 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 Greenplum Database system then there is nothing else you need to do.

When you are ready to initiate Greenplum Database and you want to use a different locale (or you are not sure which locale your system is set to), you can instruct gpinitsystem exactly which locale to use by specifying the -n locale option. For example:

$ gpinitsystem -c gp_init_config -n sv_SE

See Initializing a Greenplum Database System for information about the database initialization process.

The example above 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. On most systems, the command locale -a will provide a list of available locales.

Occasionally it is useful to mix rules from several locales, for example 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? Its 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

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 Greenplum Database system. That is, once gpinitsystem 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. Greenplum Database enforces this by recording the values of LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE that are seen by gpinitsystem. The server automatically adopts those two values based on the locale that was chosen at initialization time.

The other locale categories can be changed as desired whenever the server is running by setting the server configuration parameters that have the same name as the locale categories (see the Greenplum Database Reference Guide for more information on setting server configuration parameters). The defaults that are chosen by gpinitsystem are written into the master and segment postgresql.conf configuration files to serve as defaults when the Greenplum Database system is started. If you delete these assignments from the master and each segment postgresql.conf files then the server will inherit the settings from its 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 on each Greenplum Database host (master and segments) before starting the system. A consequence of this is that if client and server are set up in different locales, messages may appear in different languages depending on where they originated.

Inheriting the locale from the execution environment 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 for your operating system, in particular the documentation about gettext, for more information.

Native language support (NLS), which enables messages to be translated to the user's preferred language, is not enabled in Greenplum Database for languages other than English. This is independent of the other locale support.

The character set support in Greenplum Database allows you to store text in a variety of character sets, including single-byte character sets such as the ISO 8859 series and multiple-byte character sets such as EUC (Extended Unix Code), UTF-8, and Mule internal code. All supported character sets can be used transparently by clients, but a few are not supported for use within the server (that is, as a server-side encoding). The default character set is selected while initializing your Greenplum Database array using gpinitsystem. It can be overridden when you create a database, so you can have multiple databases each with a different character set.

gpinitsystem defines the default character set for a Greenplum Database system by reading the setting of the ENCODING parameter in the gp_init_config file at initialization time. The default character set is UNICODE or UTF8.

You can create a database with a different character set besides what is used as the system-wide default. For example:

=> CREATE DATABASE korean WITH ENCODING 'EUC_KR';

Since these locale settings are frozen by gpinitsystem, the apparent flexibility to use different encodings in different databases is more theoretical than real.

One way to use multiple encodings safely is to set the locale to C or POSIX during initialization time, thus disabling any real locale awareness.

Greenplum Database supports automatic character set conversion between server and client for certain character set combinations. The conversion information is stored in the master pg_conversion system catalog table. Greenplum Database comes with some predefined conversions or you can create a new conversion using the SQL command CREATE CONVERSION.

To enable automatic character set conversion, you have to tell Greenplum Database the character set (encoding) you would like to use in the client. There are several ways to accomplish this:

• Using the \encoding command in psql, which allows you to change client encoding on the fly.
• Using SET client_encoding TO. Setting the client encoding can be done with this SQL command:

  => SET CLIENT_ENCODING TO 'value';

  To query the current client encoding:

  => SHOW client_encoding;

  To return to the default encoding:

  => RESET client_encoding;

• Using the PGCLIENTENCODING environment variable. When PGCLIENTENCODING is defined in the client's environment, that client encoding is automatically selected when a connection to the server is made. (This can subsequently be overridden using any of the other methods mentioned above.)
• Setting the configuration parameter client_encoding. If client_encoding is set in the master postgresql.conf file, that client encoding is automatically selected when a connection to Greenplum Database is made. (This can subsequently be overridden using any of the other methods mentioned above.)

If the conversion of a particular character is not possible — suppose you chose EUC_JP for the server and LATIN1 for the client, then some Japanese characters do not have a representation in LATIN1 — then an error is reported.

If the client character set is defined as SQL_ASCII, encoding conversion is disabled, regardless of the server's character set. The use of SQL_ASCII is unwise unless you are working with all-ASCII data. SQL_ASCII is not supported as a server encoding.