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Background documentation UNICODE Locate the document in its SAP Library structure

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].

See also:

Installing a UNICODE-Enabled Database

Reference Manual: SAP DB 7.4, Code attribute

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