Oracle7 Server Reference Manual

Unicode (UTF2) Support

Unicode has two major encoding schemes: UCS2 and UTF2. While UCS2 is a two-byte fixed-width format, UTF2 is a multi-byte format with variable width. Oracle Server release 7.3 provides support for the UTF2 format because this enhancement is transparent to clients who already provide support for multi-byte character sets. Support for UCS2 will be available in a future release when clients themselves can support two-byte fixed-width (hence non-ASCII/EBCDIC compatible) formats.

The character set name for UTF2 is AL24UTFFSS. Conversion between UTF2 and other existing character sets is provided in this release of Oracle Server. Conversion between UTF2 and single-byte character sets is done through an internal number matching mechanism; conversion between UTF2 and multi-byte character sets is done with conversion functions and tables.

Clients should be aware that AL24UTFFSS is now officially supported as a new character set. Since the encoding scheme of UTF2 is very similar to some existing character sets, no major impact on existing products is expected.