UTF8 character set

[beginnerkid]

I have an excel sheet, which contains some japanese characters with english. I wrote a VB(6.0) program to read the excel sheet and write the values into the Teradata base. The columns of the destination table are already defined as UNICODE Character set. However, Teradata ODBC driver 3.0. enable us to specify charactersets. I set it UTF8. I am not able to store japanese characters, it shows '?' characters.

I want to know

1. When I construct the insert statement within VB apps, do I convert string(Unicode) in VB to UTF8 and then put it withinsingle quotes as part of the Insert statement ?

2. If above is not the correct way to do it, How can I go about to store Unicode into Teradata from within the VB apps ?

Thanks for the help you may offer on this

-BK

 

[ns1909]

If the session character set is UTF8 then the client is telling Teradata that it wants to insert UTF8 characters. So it is necessary that the data sent to the database is of the UTF8 format. Need to convert in this case as the driver offers no translation to UTF8 character data to be finally send to Teradata.

In which encoding is the data(japanese) present in the excel sheet. Is it Unicode? If so it generally is UCS-2 character set and is not supported yet as a session character set or the Teradata Server character set. If the encoding is in code page 932(for japanese) on windows then the user can change his locale to 932 on W2K desktop(since W2K is MUI) and set the kanjiformat in the DSN configuration to kanjisjis_0s. This option is visible only when the locale is set to code page 932. This only if the japanese data present is in 932 code page encoding and not UCS-2 encoding.