How does SAP MaxDB support UNICODE?
MaxDB currently supports UCS-2, comparable to UTF-16. The move to UTF-8 is planned. It is a major change in the kernel coding and data structures. The implementation has started and will take some time. For the time being starting with version 7.6.05 we can offer to use a logical character compression from UCS2 or ASCII to UTF-8 for non-key character columns (“UTF-8- Lite”). This allows compact storing of Unicode data. It has to be applied either with ALTER TABLE or by setting a parameter during Unicode Migration as written in respective notes. The experiences with UNICODE migrations based on MaxDB (UCS-2) today show an increase in space requirements of around 30-40%. Depending on the amount of character data, the UTF-8-Lite approach offers the chance to reduce this total significantly. Independent from your decision to now use either pure UCS-2 or also UTF-8-Lite before transitioning to the ‘real’ UTF-8, the future implementation will offer an in-place, on-the-fly migration to reach r
