UTF-8 support

You can configure a directory server to store any national language characters that can be represented in UTF-8.

IBM® Verify Directory supports a wide variety of national language characters through the UTF-8 (UCS Transformation Format) character set. In LDAP Version 3 protocol all character data that an LDAP client and server communicates is in UTF-8.

The server determines the types of characters that can be stored and searched based on the code page that is used for configuring a database. You can specify the database character set as UTF-8 or set to use the local character set of the system on which the server exists. The local character set is based on the locale, language, and code page environment on the system.

If you specify UTF-8, you can store any UTF-8 character data in the directory. LDAP clients on a system that support any UTF-8 supported language can access and search the directory properly. If the LDAP clients are on a system with a local character set, the client might not correctly show the results that are retrieved from the server in a particular character set.

If you use a UTF-8 database, the database performance improves because no data conversion is required when you store data or retrieve data from the database.