Types of encoding schemes

Different encoding schemes can represent character data. You can incorporate EBCDIC, ASCII, and Unicode encoding schemes in Db2 ODBC.

The EBCDIC and ASCII encoding scheme include multiple code pages; each code page represents 256 characters for one specific geography or one generic geography. The Unicode encoding scheme does not require the use of code pages, because it represents over 65,000 characters. Unicode can also accommodate many different languages and geographies.

The Unicode standard defines several implementations including UTF-8, UCS-2, UTF-16, and UCS-4. ODBC Db2 supports Unicode in the following formats:
  • UTF-8 (variable length, 1-byte - 6-byte characters)
  • UCS-2 (2-byte characters)