Unicode support in Db2

Unicode is a universal encoding scheme for written characters and text that enables the exchange of data internationally. Unicode provides a character set standard that can be used all over the world.

Unicode uses an encoding scheme that provides code points for approximately 100,000 characters. An extension called UTF-16 allows for encoding as many as a million more characters. Unicode provides the ability to encode all characters used for the written languages of the world. Unicode treats alphabetic characters, ideographic characters, and symbols equivalently because it specifies a numeric value and a name for each of its characters. Unicode includes punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, technical symbols, geometric shapes, and dingbats.

Db2 provides the following Unicode encoding forms:

• UTF-8: Unicode Transformation Format, 8-bit encoding form that is designed for ease of use with existing ASCII-based systems.
• UTF-16: Unicode Transformation Format, 16-bit encoding form that is designed to provide code values for over a million characters and a superset of UCS-2. UCS-2 is a universal character set and is coded in 2 octets, which means that characters are represented in 16 bits per character.

Unicode CCSIDs: The Unicode CCSID field of panel DSNTIPF is pre-filled with 1208. Db2 chooses the CCSIDs for double-byte and single-byte values (1200 for DBCS and 367 for SBCS). CCSID 1200 corresponds to UTF-16 and CCSID 367 is for 7-bit ASCII.