From: Addison Phillips (addison@yahoo-inc.com)
Date: Mon Jul 17 2006 - 16:25:16 CDT
> When I insert Chinese/Japanese raw data to Sybase unichar /
> univarchar column, should I insert the raw data (e.g. 海外旅行保険)
> directly or insert it's Unicode (e.g. E6 B5 B7 E5 A4 96 E6 97
> 85 E8 A1 8C E4 BF 9D E9 99 BA for UTF-8)??
All text inside a computer system has a character encoding. Character
encodings map the logical character to a sequence of bytes in the file or in
the computer's memory.
SQL statements are text. If you wish to insert some value into a SQL
database (such as Sybase), you essentially send some text containing the SQL
query to the database. This text has an encoding. If that encoding is UTF-8,
the byte sequence might be E6 B5 B7 etc. If that text is in some other
encoding, the byte sequence will be different.
Generally your database client (or driver) and the database server cooperate
to manage encodings. Your client is configured to use a specific encoding
(usually at install time) when communicating with the database server. The
server will expect queries to use this encoding and will use to it convert
to the server's native (internal) encoding (such as UTF-16 or UTF-8).
In other words, you usually want to send text encoded in whatever the
connection encoding is to the database. Your configuration matters a great
deal in this and you may want the connection encoding to be UTF-8 (so that
you can transfer the full range of Unicode), even if your local runtime uses
some other encoding. It is difficult to be more precise than that without
more information.
I should also note: your programming language or driver type may also
influence how the data is actually encoded (for example, JDBC drivers
usually work with java.lang.String objects, which use Unicode, and not
necessarily the encoding used by, say, an Open Connect client).
Sybase describes some of this in a document located here: http://www.sybase.
com/content/1026310/unicode_support_wp.pdf
Hope that helps,
Addison
Addison Phillips
Internationalization Architect - Yahoo! Inc.
Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.
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