Effects of Shift-Out and Shift-In Characters on Export Widths in MODIFY USER - Teradata VantageCloud Lake

Lake - Working with SQL

Deployment
VantageCloud
Edition
Lake
Product
Teradata VantageCloud Lake
Release Number
Published
February 2025
ft:locale
en-US
ft:lastEdition
2025-11-21
dita:mapPath
jbe1714339405530.ditamap
dita:ditavalPath
pny1626732985837.ditaval
dita:id
jbe1714339405530

Shift-Out and Shift-In are control characters used to switch to a different character set and back for data exported to mainframes. Workstation-attached systems do not use the Shift-Out and Shift-In characters.

  • Shift-Out shifts to an alternative character encoding, which for Teradata is a double-byte encoding.
  • Shift-In returns to the normal character encoding, which for Teradata is a single-byte encoding.

Vantage assumes that all character strings (with the exception of CHARACTER SET GRAPHIC columns outside of Field mode) are in single-byte mode initially, and must be returned to single-byte mode before the string ends.

The following session character sets are affected significantly by Shift-Out/Shift-In considerations for export widths.

  • KatakanaEBCDIC
  • Any session character set that ends in the string '_0I'
  • Any site-defined session character set with STATEMACHINE SOSI0E0F.

For more information about these character sets in the context of session export widths, see Working with Export Widths .