This paper provides an overview of the Unicode character set, outlining its importance for business and then goes on to detail the support for Unicode in the Advantage(TM) Ingres(r) 2.6 Relational Database Management System (RDBMS).

As organizations expand their business operations into a global marketplace they must support a customer base with a multitude of languages. The challenge of serving a global, multilingual customer base led to the development of a character set standard called Unicode, which is published by the Unicode Consortium.

Mission critical data is usually held in an RDBMS. Advantage Ingres is an RDBMS and release 2.6 features data types and support for the Unicode character set.

Some of the advanced features discussed in the paper include:

• Automatic normalization to ensure data integrity in the RDBMS.
• Automatic UTF-8 conversion for Web based applications.
• Applications using a selection of interfaces including JDBC, ODBC, Advantage Ingres/OpenAPI(r) and Web Technologies are supported.

Advantage Ingres release 2.6 represents a significant step towards supporting global applications with a RDBMS.

Audience Assumptions:

It is assumed that the audience has some knowledge of Relational Database Management Systems.