LANG Environment Variable Settings

This topic details how to set or change the LANG environment variable. The LANG environment variable controls the locale of the host. If this variable is not set, then the installer reports this issue with the identifier: S0300. If this variable is not set to a valid value, then the installer reports this issue with the identifier: S0301.

Set the Host Locale

Each host has a system setting for the Linux environment variable LANG. LANG determines the locale category for native language, local customs, and coded character set in the absence of the LC_ALL and other LC_ environment variables. LANG can be used by applications to determine which language to use for error messages and instructions, collating sequences, date formats, and so forth.

To change the LANG setting for the database administrator, edit, /etc/profile, or /dbadmin/.bashrc or /home/dbadmin/.bash_profile on all cluster hosts and set the environment variable; for example:

export LANG=en_US.UTF8

The LANG setting controls the following in Vertica:

• OS-level errors and warnings, for example, "file not found" during COPY operations.
• Some formatting functions, such as TO_CHAR and TO_NUMBER. See also Template Patterns for Numeric Formatting.

The LANG setting does not control the following:

• Vertica specific error and warning messages. These are always in English at this time.
• Collation of results returned by SQL issued to Vertica. This must be done using a database parameter instead. See Implement Locales for International Data Sets section in the Administrator's Guide for details.