The GRAPHIC server character set is designed for IBM DB2 compatibility.
GRAPHIC is a canonical character set. Data stored as GRAPHIC can be shared among heterogeneous clients.
You can specify GRAPHIC as the character set for a table column, but not as the default character set for a user.
Supported GRAPHIC Client Character Sets
- ASCII
- Halfwidth Japanese
- Special characters
Because of this, only the UTF16 session character set is usable with GRAPHIC data on VantageCloud Lake. GRAPHIC data is encoded as Unicode.
Unsupported GRAPHIC Client Character Sets
GRAPHIC is designed to support client character sets where excluding non-double-byte characters is desired. This is not true of ASCII, EBCDIC, or UTF8.
Moreover, the GRAPHIC pad character is three bytes in UTF8 so that standard padding techniques cannot be used.
For these reasons, the GRAPHIC server character set is not compatible with UTF8 or any character sets other than UTF16.
Restriction on Specification of GRAPHIC as the Default Character Set
You can specify GRAPHIC as the character set for a table column, but not as the default character set for a user.