Data in the application needs to be presented in a way that conforms to user expectation, if not, the meaning of the data can sometimes be misinterpreted. For example, '12/11/05' implies '11th December 2005' in the United States, whereas in the United Kingdom it means '12th November 2005'. Similar confusion exists for number and monetary formats, for example, the period (.) is a decimal separator in the United States, whereas in Germany, it is used as a thousand separator.
Different languages have their own sorting rules, some languages are collated according to the letter sequence in the alphabet, some according to stroke count in the letter, and there are some languages which are ordered by the pronunciation of the words. Presenting data that is not sorted according to the linguistic sequence that your users are accustomed to can make searching for information difficult and time-consuming.
Depending on the application logic and the volume of data retrieved from the database, it may be more appropriate to format the data at the database level rather than at the application level. Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2) offers many features that help you to refine the presentation of data when the user locale preference is known. The following sections include examples of locale-sensitive operations in SQL: