Unicode Queries?

["James H H Lampert" <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

We are planning to convert one of our products to a 
Unicode-based database, and we've got most of the 
prep-work done already. There's only one major problem: 
we're still using OPNQRYF to generate queries on the 
database.
I'm assuming that, because it's a CL command, OPNQRYF 
isn't going to cut it for selecting on Unicode (probably 
strict UCS-2 without surrogates) strings, at least not for 
the general case of Unicode strings that can't be 
represented in any one EBCDIC codepage.
What *would* cut it? Some other OS/400-native form of 
query? SQL? (If the latter, please be aware that my only 
experience using SQL on a 400 has been going through JDBC, 
with a product called SQUIRREL that one of my colleagues 
turned me on to, and that whatever we do has to be able to 
work under V4R4 and later [V4R2, if anything has to be 
done from C].)
--
JHHL