Although Unicode provides a consistent way of representing
text across multiple languages, there are different versions which
provide different data sizes for each character.
The following list describes the versions that are supported within
an
IBM® Informix® ODBC
application.
- UCS-2
- ISO encoding standard that maps Unicode characters to 2 bytes
each. UCS-2 is the common encoding standard on Windows.
IBM Informix ODBC Driver for IBM AIX® platforms
supports UCS-2 encoding. IBM Informix ODBC Driver for Windows supports only UCS-2.
- UCS-4
- ISO encoding standard that maps Unicode characters into 4 bytes
each.
The IBM Informix ODBC Driver supports
UCS-4 on UNIX platforms.
- UTF-8
- Encoding standard that is based on a single (8 bit) byte. UTF-8
defines a mechanism to transform all Unicode characters into a variable
length (1 - 4) encoding of bytes.
The IBM Informix ODBC Driver uses UTF-8 encoding
for all UNIX applications that
connect to the Data Direct (formerly Merant) driver manager.
The 7-bit ASCII characters have the same encoding under both ASCII
and UTF-8. This has the advantage that UTF-8 can be used with much
existing software without extensive revision.
Important: In
applications that use Unicode, the driver does the work of code set
conversion from Unicode to the database locale and vice versa.The
UTF-8 is the only type of Unicode code set that can be set as the
client locale.
Release date: September 2013