Sybase Unicode Support 1

[GaryAshford]

Hi.

I have been trying to establish the level of unicode support provided by ASE 12.5.
As far as I can tell, there are two new character types; UNICHAR and UNIVARCHAR and that is it.

Is it possible to configure a ct-lib application so that all of the "meta-data"; username, password, hostname, error messages, sql text, column and table names are unicode as well (like it is with Oracle for example)?

Thanks all

 

[JMCraig]

The short answer to your second question about meta-data is no; it doesn't work that way. (Does ANSI SQL-92 allow Unicode meta-data and table names and so on? I don't think it does, but it may not say; I'd have to check.)

However, there is an important aspect of Unicode support that you don't mention. You can configure a database to have UTF-8 as it's native character set. Then your ct-lib app can do a simple; one spot conversion between UCS-2 (which would be the native string type in your ct-lib app) and UTF-8 (which would be on the DB). Now, AFAIK, even setting up the DB to stored UTF-8 won't allow non-ASCII characters in table-names and other meta-data (because you'll find the allowed characters for identifiers are still limited). In any case, this may be a useful approach to consider and I don't know for sure about UTF-8 in identifiers (although my reading of the docs says it's not allowed); you might try one of the Sybase forums (one of the gurus there will know for sure).

Try this link:

http://www.sybase.com/detail/1,6904,1012843,00.html

BOL,

John
J M Craig
Alpha-G Consulting, LLC

http://alphagconsulting.bizhosting.com

nsjmcraig@netscape.net

 

[GaryAshford]

Thanks very much for your reply.

Our ct-lib application does use UTF16 characters internally and the database is enabled for UTF-8 so this side of things is working Ok. We will just have to convert to "monocode" for logons, sqltext, column names, etc.

Gary