Use this option to read in options from the specified environment variable or configuration file. See Using configuration files.

If you want to protect passwords or other information in the configuration file, you can use the File Hiding utility to obfuscate the contents of the configuration file. See File Hiding utility (dbfhide).

If the UCA (Unicode Collation Algorithm) is used for either CHAR or NCHAR data types (see -z and -zn), then specifying -a causes string comparisons to respect accent differences between letters (for example, e is less than é). By default, accents are ignored (meaning e is equal to é). If all base letters (letters with accents and case removed) are otherwise equal, then accents are compared from left to right. See Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA).

If the UCA is used for either CHAR or NCHAR data types (see -z and -zn below), then specifying -af causes string comparisons to respect accent differences between letters (for example, e is less than é). By default, accents are ignored (meaning e is equal to é). If all base letters (letters with accents removed) are otherwise equal, then accents are compared from right to left, consistent with the rules of the French language.

For more information, see Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA).

SQL Anywhere compares all strings as if they are varying length and stored using the VARCHAR domain. This includes string comparisons involving fixed length CHAR or NCHAR columns. In addition, SQL Anywhere never trims or pads values with trailing blanks when the values are stored in the database.

By default, SQL Anywhere treats blanks as significant characters. Hence the value 'a ' (the character 'a' followed by a blank) is not equivalent to the single-character string 'a'. Inequality comparisons also treat a blank as any other character in the collation.

If blank padding is enabled (the dbinit -b option), the semantics of string comparisons more closely follow the ANSI/ISO SQL standard. With blank-padding enabled, SQL Anywhere ignores trailing blanks in any comparison.

In the example above, an equality comparison of 'a ' to 'a' in a blank-padded database returns TRUE. With a blank-padded database, fixed-length string values are padded with blanks when they are fetched by an application. Whether or not the application receives a string truncation warning on such an assignment is controlled by the ansi_blanks connection option. See ansi_blanks option [compatibility].

For databases created with this option, all values are considered to be case sensitive in comparisons and string operations. Identifiers in the database are case insensitive, even in case sensitive databases.

This option is provided for compatibility with the ISO/ANSI SQL standard. The default is that all comparisons are case insensitive.

If you specify a new name for the DBA user for the database, you can no longer connect to the database as the user DBA. You can also specify a different password for the DBA database user. If you do not specify a password, the default password sql is used. If you do not specify this option, the default user ID DBA with password sql is created.

Either of the following commands creates a database with a DBA user named testuser with the default password sql:

dbinit -dba testuser mydb.db

dbinit -dba testuser, mydb.db

The following command uses the default user ID DBA with password mypwd:

dbinit -dba ,mypwd mydb.db

The following command changes the DBA user to user1 with password mypwd:

dbinit -dba user1,mypwd mydb.db

It is recommended that the password be composed of 7-bit ASCII characters as other characters may not work correctly if the server cannot convert from the client's character set to UTF-8.

Pre-allocating space for the database helps reduce the risk of running out of space on the drive the database is located on. As well, it can help improve performance by increasing the amount of data that can be stored in the database before the database server needs to grow the database, which can be a time-consuming operation.

By default, the size is in bytes. You can use k, m, g, or p to specify units of kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes, or pages, respectively.

This specifies simple encryption for the database. This option is deprecated. Use -ea simple instead.

This option allows you to specify settings for database or table encryption (-et). For strong encryption, specify either AES, or AES_FIPS for the FIPS-approved algorithm, and specify the -ek option. AES_FIPS uses a separate library. See Strong encryption.

On Windows CE, the FIPS algorithm is only supported with ARM processors.

Specify -ea simple for simple encryption (do not specify -ek or -ep). Simple encryption is equivalent to obfuscation and is intended only to keep data hidden in the event of casual direct access of the database file, to make it more difficult for someone to decipher the data in your database using a disk utility to look at the file. For greater security, specify strong encryption.

To create a database that is not encrypted, do not include the -ea option (and do not specify -e, -et, -ep, or -et), or specify -ea none.

If you do not specify the -ea option, the default behavior is as follows:

• -ea none, if -ek, -ep, or -et is not specified
• -ea AES, if -ek or -ep is specified (with or without -et)
• -ea simple, if -et is used without -ek or -ep

Algorithm names are case insensitive.

The following command creates a strongly encrypted database and specifies the encryption key and algorithm.

dbinit -ek "0kZ2o56AK#" -ea AES_FIPS "myencrypteddb.db"

File compression utilities cannot compress encrypted database files as much as unencrypted ones.

This option specifies that you want to create a strongly encrypted database by specifying an encryption key directly in the command. The algorithm used to encrypt the database is AES or AES_FIPS as specified by the -ea option. If you specify the -ek option without specifying -ea, the AES algorithm is used.

When specified with -et, the database is not encrypted. Instead, table encryption is enabled. See Table encryption.

Protect your encryption key. Be sure to store a copy of your key in a safe location. A lost key will result in a completely inaccessible database, from which there is no recovery.

This option specifies that you want to create a strongly encrypted database by inputting the encryption key in a dialog box. This provides an extra measure of security by never allowing the encryption key to be seen in clear text.

You must input the encryption key twice to confirm that it was entered correctly. If the keys don't match, the initialization fails.

When specified with -et, the database is not encrypted. Instead, table encryption is enabled.

For more information, see Strong encryption.

This option enables table encryption for the database, allowing you to create encrypted tables instead of encrypting the entire database. If you specify the -et option with -ek or -ep, the AES algorithm is used. When you specify only -et, simple encryption is used.

Enabling table encryption does not mean your tables are encrypted. You must encrypt tables individually, after database creation. See Encrypting tables.

When table encryption is enabled, table pages for the encrypted table, associated index pages, and temporary file pages are encrypted, as well as the transaction log pages that contain transactions on encrypted tables.

The following example creates the database new.db with strong encryption enabled for tables using the key abc, and the AES_FIPS encryption algorithm:

dbinit -et -ek abc -ea AES_FIPS new.db

If you want to use the Sybase jConnect JDBC driver to access system catalog information, you need to install jConnect catalog support (it is installed by default). Use this option if you want to exclude the jConnect system objects. You can still use JDBC, as long as you do not access system information. If you want, you can add Sybase jConnect support at a later time using Sybase Central or the ALTER DATABASE statement.

For more information, see Installing jConnect system objects into a database.

When you specify this option, dbinit lists the available character set encodings and then stops. No database is created. Each character set encoding is identified by one or more labels. These are strings that can be used to identify the encoding. Each line of text that appears lists the encoding label and alternate labels by which the encoding can be identified. These labels fall into one of several common categories: SA (the SQL Anywhere label), IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), ICU (International Components for Unicode), JAVA, or ASE (Adaptive Server Enterprise).

If you want to view a list of character set encodings that includes the alternate labels, specify the -le+ option.

When the Initialization utility reports the character set encoding, it always reports the SQL Anywhere version of the label. For example, the following command reports the CHAR character set encoding windows-1250:

dbinit -ze cp1250 -z uca test.db

The page size for a database can be (in bytes) 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, or 32768, with 4096 being the default.

Large databases can benefit from a larger page size. For example, the number of I/O operations required to scan a table is generally lower, as a whole page is read in at a time. However, there are additional memory requirements for large page sizes. It is strongly recommended that you do performance testing (and testing in general) when choosing a page size. Then choose the smallest page size that gives satisfactory results. For most applications, 16 KB or 32 KB page sizes are not recommended. You should not use page sizes of 16 KB or 32 KB in production systems unless you can be sure that a large database server cache is always available, and only after you have investigated the tradeoffs of memory and disk space with its performance characteristics. It is particularly important to pick the correct (and reasonable) page size if a large number of databases are going to be started on the same server.

For more information, see:

• Use an appropriate page size
• Table and page sizes

Checksums are used to determine whether a database page has been modified on disk. When you create a database with checksums enabled, a checksum is calculated for each page just before it is written to disk. The next time the page is read from disk, the page's checksum is recalculated and compared to the checksum stored on the page. If the checksums are different, then the page has been modified or corrupted on disk, and an error occurs. Critical database pages are always checksummed by the database server, regardless of whether -s is specified.

If you are creating a database that will be deployed to Windows CE, you should enable checksums. This helps to provide early detection if the database file becomes corrupt.

The collation sequence is used for sorting and comparing character data types (CHAR, VARCHAR, and LONG VARCHAR). The collation provides character comparison and ordering information for the encoding (character set) being used. It is important to choose your collation carefully. It cannot be changed after the database has been created without unloading and reloading the database. If the collation is not specified, SQL Anywhere chooses a collation based on the operating system language and character set. See Choosing collations.

Optionally, you can specify collation tailoring options (collation-tailoring-string) for additional control over the sorting and comparing of characters. These options take the form of keyword=value pairs, assembled in parentheses, following the collation name. For example:

dbinit -c -z uca(locale=es;case=LowerFirst) spanish2.db

The syntax for specifying these keyword pairs is identical to what is defined for the COLLATION clause of the CREATE DATABASE statement. See Collation tailoring options.

Case and accent settings specified in the collation-tailoring-string override case and accent options for dbinit ( -c, -a, and -af), in the event that you specify both.

Most collations specified by -z dictate both the encoding (character set) and ordering. For those collations, -ze should not be specified.

If the collation specified by -z is UCA (Unicode Collation Algorithm), then -ze can specify UTF-8 or any single-byte encoding for CHAR data types. By default, SQL Anywhere uses UTF-8. Use -ze to specify a locale-specific encoding and get the benefits of the UCA for comparison and ordering.

The collation sequence used for sorting and comparing of national character data types (NCHAR, NVARCHAR, and LONG NVARCHAR) is specified using -zn. The collation provides character ordering information for the UTF-8 encoding (character set) being used. Values are UCA (the default), or UTF8BIN which provides a binary ordering of all characters whose encoding is greater than 0x7E. If the dbicu10 and dbicudt10 DLLs are not installed, then the default NCHAR collation is UTF8BIN. For more information, see Choosing collations.

Optionally, you can specify collation tailoring options (collation-tailoring-string) for additional control over the sorting and comparing of characters. These options take the form of keyword=value pairs, assembled in parentheses, following the collation name. For example:

dbinit -c -zn UCA(case=LowerFirst) sens.db

The syntax for specifying these keyword pairs is identical to what is defined for the COLLATION clause of the CREATE DATABASE statement. See Collation tailoring options.

Case and accent settings specified in the collation-tailoring-string override case and accent options for dbinit ( -c, -a, and -af), in the event that you specify both.