Teradata database character sets

The Teradata database supports a fixed number of character set types for each char or varchar column in a table.

Use this query to get the character set for a Teradata column:

select 'column_name', chartype from dbc.columns 
    where tablename =  'table_name'

The database character set types are:

• Latin: chartype=1. The character set for U.S. and European applications which limit character data to the ASCII or ISO 8859 Latin1 character sets. This is the default.
• Unicode: chartype=2. 16-bit Unicode characters from the ISO 10646 Level 1 character set. This setting supports all of the ICU multi-byte character sets.
• KANJISJIS: chartype=3. For Japanese third-party tools that rely on the string length or physical space allocation of KANJISJIS.
• Graphic: chartype=4. Provided for Db2® compatibility.
  Note: The KANJI1: chartype=5 character set is available for Japanese applications that must remain compatible with previous releases; however, this character set will be removed in a subsequent release because it does not support the new string functions and will not support future characters sets. We recommend that you use the set of SQL translation functions provided to convert KANJI1 data to Unicode.