In the migration to Unicode, one of the most critical issues for database
support is maintaining compatibility with the existing data which is
commonly used on application systems. The normal approach currently
deployed is to use UTF8 as Unicode encoding in these systems. As the
encoding schema for UTF8 is nearly same as those for other multibyte
character sets, it is easy to support Unicode by UTF8 without any major
change for database and its application systems. But UTF8 is ASCII based
encoding and cannot be applied to EBCDIC based systems. To make EBCDIC
based application systems easy to migrate to Unicode, an EBCDIC based
multibyte encoding schema is needed. This paper presents a EBCDIC based
Unicode transformation encoding proposed by IBM and describe how this
encoding will be incorporated into Oracle's globalization
support. In the end, it will raise the proposal to have a standard EBCDIC
based Unicode transformation encoding.
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