Potential problems when inserting non-Unicode data into a Unicode table

If you insert EBCDIC or ASCII data into a Unicode table, the data is converted to Unicode. The length of this converted data might increase so much that it causes the operation to fail.

If the source encoding scheme is EBCDIC or ASCII and the target encoding scheme is UTF-8, the worst-case expansion is three times the original. To allow for this worst-case expansion, in the CREATE TABLE statement , declare your UTF-8 columns to be three times the size of your ASCII or EBCDIC columns. You might also want to make your columns varying length so that Db2 does not need to perform padding and truncation on the columns when the length changes due to conversion.

For more information about determining the appropriate column length, see Estimating the column size for Unicode data.