Culture-specific features

You can use non-ASCII characters to name user-specifiable database objects, such as tables, columns, views, statements, cursors, and SPL routines, and you can use a collation order that suits local customs.

You can also use non-ASCII characters in many other contexts. For example, you can use them to specify the WHERE and ORDER BY clauses of your SELECT statements or to sort data in NCHAR and NVARCHAR columns. You can use GLS collation features without the modification of existing code.

You can use non-ASCII characters in expression comparisons that involve any character-based data type.

You can use display formats that are specific to a country or culture outside the U.S. to specify date, time, numeric, and monetary values when they are displayed in literal strings. The database server can translate these formats to the appropriate internal database format.

The client application can perform code-set conversion between convertible code sets to allow you to access and share data between databases and clients that have different code sets. For more information about code-set conversion, see Perform code-set conversion.