This topic contains information on how to design your applications for use with solidDB databases in Unicode mode.
Supported interfaces
▪ ODBC
The solidDB ODBC Driver is Unicode compliant; it conforms to the Microsoft ODBC 3.51 standard.
The solidDB package provides two versions of the ODBC driver, one for Unicode and one for ASCII. The Unicode version is a superset of the ASCII version; you can use it with either Unicode or ASCII character sets.
▪ JDBC
Unicode is supported in the solidDB JDBC Driver, which is an implementation of the JDBC 2.0 standard.
As Java uses natively Unicode strings, supporting Unicode means primarily that, when accessing character data in solidDB database, no data type conversions are necessary. Additionally, the JDBC ResultSet Class methods getUnicodeStream and setUnicodeStream are supported for handling large Unicode texts stored in solidDB databases.
Multi-client environments with different locale settings
SQL string functions work as expected. Conversions are provided implicitly, when necessary. If either of the operands is of wide-character type, the result is always of wide-character type.
As of solidDB version 7.0 Interim Fix 2, the functions UPPER() and LOWER() perform the uppercase or lowercase conversions for all Unicode characters in Unicode databases. In versions prior to 7.0 Interim Fix 2, conversions are supported only when the characters are part of the Latin 1 code page. If a Unicode character cannot be converted to uppercase or lowercase, the input string is returned as it is.
Character padding
The parameter setting, SQL.CharPadding=yes, is not effective in Unicode databases; blank characters in CHAR values are always discarded.