Using an alternate character set allows naming tables and databases using an extended set of characters. However, the internal representation of these extended characters depends on the session character set.
Although Teradata ARC can be used with a Teradata Database that uses an alternate character set, special care must be taken when archive and restore operations are used on a Teradata Database with an alternate character set:
- When archiving objects with names that use non-Latin characters, use the same character set defined using the multinational collation option for the database.
Multinational collation provides more culturally aware ordering of data in the database. If a different character set is used, Teradata ARC might have difficulty restoring the archive. To learn more about multinational collation, refer to SQL Fundamentals.
- To restore an archive made with an alternate character set, use the same character set used in the archive.
- Do not restore an archive on a system that cannot handle the character sets used to create the archive.
- When the KATAKANAEBCDIC character set is passed to Teradata ARC, all messages are uppercase because that character set does not support lowercase Latin letters.
- Teradata ARC does not support the use of control characters (0x00 through 0x1F) in object names.
- Teradata ARC treats multi-byte character object names as case sensitive object names. This means that the user has to specify a multi-byte object name in the exact case that was used when the object was created in the Teradata Database, otherwise Teradata ARC may not be able to locate that object. Character sets which may contain multi-byte characters include any of the non-Latin character sets. The ASCII and EBCIDIC character sets are not included in this restriction.
When a Teradata ARC run begins while using an alternate character set, the software displays the following message, where character_set_nameis the name of the character set defined in the runtime parameter:
CHARACTER SET IN USE: character_set_name