User Guide

SAP AG November 2002

UNICODE

Data types such as CHAR ASCII and CHAR EBCDIC are mainly suited to English and central

European languages. With other character sets, a code attribute is usually used for these

data types. This code attribute uses a different presentation code to ASCII and EBCDIC, even

for internal storage in the database system. This causes problems if you want to access these

database systems using a different character set, or if you want to exchange data between

database systems with different character sets.

You can avoid these problems by using internal character coding in accordance with

UNICODE. Internally, the UNICODE data is stored in UTF-16/UCS-2 format. In UTF-16/UCS-

2 format, all characters are two bytes long.

SAP DB is able to display various presentation codes in UNICODE format (UNICODE code in

line with ISO 10646, page 1).

Metadata in UNICODE

The names of the database objects (such as table or column names) can be stored internally

in UNICODE and can therefore then be displayed in the required presentation code in the

database tools.

Application data in UNICODE

SAP DB supports the code attribute UNICODE for the data types CHAR[ACTER], VARCHAR

and LONG[VARCHAR].