which database, on what operating system?
the only "locale" i'm familiar with is a feature of Unix-like OSes. it's used to select appropriate localizations of things like currency formats, time formats, sorting sequences, and so on; specifically, it's used by the shared C library, and other libraries which depend on it. non-C languages often (but not always) have to go to a little extra trouble to utilize the locale specifications - i do not know how, or even whether, they are available from
Java. (i've never written a program that had to be localized, namely, in any language.)
as for why any of this should impact data being retrieved from a database, i really can't imagine. maybe some databases do this by default, but that would surprise me - i can see too many ways for such behaviour to mess up the data, when the purpose of a database is to make sure the data is
not messed up.
[ February 08, 2005: Message edited by: M Beck ]