UTF16 Client Character Set Support - Teradata Database

International Character Set Support

Product
Teradata Database
Release Number
15.10
Language
English (United States)
Last Update
2018-09-25
dita:id
B035-1125
lifecycle
previous
Product Category
Teradata® Database

The UTF16 client character set is permanently enabled for use in Teradata Database.

The Teradata UTF16 client character set supports UTF16, one of the standard ways of encoding Unicode character data, based on the Unicode 6.0 standard. Each UTF16 character requires exactly 16 bits.

The KANJI1 server character set is ambiguous with regards to multibyte characters and some single-byte characters, and cannot be reliably translated to UTF16.

For best results, use the UNICODE server character set with the UTF16 session character set, unless the KANJI1 server character set is required.

The endianness of UTF16 is the same as endianness of numbers for the session.

Endianness is the byte ordering convention of data that is represented with multiple bytes. The ordering method is either big endian or little endian. For example, the big endian method indicates the number 256 as the sequence 0x01 0x00. The little endian method indicates the number 256 as 0x00 0x01.

The maximum length of an SQL error message is 255 bytes. Because UTF16 has two bytes per character, the maximum length of an SQL error message is 127 characters.

For example, message number 5468 in UTF8 appears like this in BTEQ:

   BTEQ -- Enter your DBC/SQL request or BTEQ command:
   DELETE USER tn2;
   
   *** Failure 5468 Cannot delete database because either this database has a join or hash index in it or one of its tables has a join or hash index defined on it.

In UTF16, the message text is truncated:

   BTEQ -- Enter your DBC/SQL request or BTEQ command:
   DELETE USER tn2;
   
   *** Failure 5468 Cannot delete database because either this database has a join or hash index in it or one of its tables has a join or hash index.