Support for Unicode
This release contains the first phase of Ingres support for Unicode; further Unicode support will be added in future releases.
In this release, the DBMS supports three new data types:
• nchar
• nvarchar
• long nvarchar
These data types store character data using two bytes for each character. Collation of these data types uses the standard collation algorithm as defined by the Unicode organization, and the data types can be used in indexes and database statistics.
The native two-byte (UCS2) format is supported and maintained through the entire process, from the front-end application, through the DBMS, to the data representation on disk.
The embedded SQL preprocessor for C and C++ supports declaration of wchar_t variables, which are assumed to contain multi-byte Unicode character strings.
OpenAPI version 3 was added to indicate support for these new data types.
VDBA also supports the new data types.
Support for the ODBC and JDBC drivers is present through their normal Unicode interfaces.
These new data types are not supported in any of the character-based tools or any of the terminal monitors.
This release does not support coercion between Unicode data types and non-Unicode data types such as char and varchar.