An international database has one character set (code page) associated with all its data. This database character set information is stored in the database.

In addition, a database server has an operating character set. The operating character set is used for every character operation such as compare and substring. You can use the Internal Code Page (-cpinternal) international startup parameter to define the operating character set. If you do not use -cpinternal, the default operating character set is iso8859-1.