Re: UTF-8 or UTF-16

Hi Bruce,

Thanks for the response. In this scenario we were talking about
storing/retrieving data in DB2 using the PASE SQL CLI APIs.

3 - If you've used both UTF-8 and UTF-16, have you found one to be more

advantageous than the other?

Yes, but it usually is driven by the other application/platform.

Do you have a "for example" you could share?

Thanks,
Aaron Bartell


On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 5:36 PM, Bruce Vining <bvining@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

Aaron,

I can't say my answers are real crisp, but...

1 - If you are required to store Asian characters, what CCSID do you use?

I didn't catch where you mentioned where you are storing the data. As you
know there are a number of possible CCSIDs that can get the job done. As
you asked "what CCSID do you use" my answer is 1200 (UTF-16) assuming we're
talking DB2 tables/files. If you're talking IFS then I've used both 1200
(UTF-16) and 1208 (UTF-8). And if we go far enough back, 13488 (UCS-2).

2 - Are there IBM i server-side advantages to using UTF-16? (i.e. is

text

searching quicker for Asian languages because they have two bytes in

UTF-16

vs. 3 in UTF-8?)

Assuming DB2 storage some consider the associated data types to be either
advantages or disadvantages. UTF-8 is implemented using the character data
type while UTF-16 is implemented using the graphic data type. With graphic
what you read is what you get, what you write is what gets written (well,
depending on the interface used to DB2). With character job CCSID can come
into play. From my answer to #1 above you can safely guess that I consider
conversion to/from the job CCSID to be a disadvantage.

If you are really going to be doing searches through the Chinese text then
having 50% more bytes to fetch and compare could have an impact (though I
don't know how much data you're talking about, so this could just be a
nit).

3 - If you've used both UTF-8 and UTF-16, have you found one to be more
advantageous than the other?

Yes, but it usually is driven by the other application/platform. In general
I use UTF-16 when possible, but that really is just a personal preference.

Bruce