The Unicode standard, a subset of the International Standards Organization’s ISO 10646 standard, is an international character set. Unicode is identical to the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) of ISO 10646, which supports all the major scripts and languages in the world. Therefore, it is a superset of all existing character sets.
The major advantages of Unicode are:
Provides single-source development. This means you develop an application once and it can then be localized for multiple locales and in multiple languages. By using a single unified character set, you do not have to modify your applications to take into account differences between character sets, thus reducing development, testing, and support costs.
Allows you to mix different languages in the same database. An all-Unicode system does not require that you design your database to keep track of the character set of your data.
The Enhanced Full-Text Search engine supports Unicode. To use this feature, you need to obtain and install the Unicode Developer’s Kit (also known as UDK). This contains everything you need to set up a Unicode-enabled client/server database system.
To configure the Full-Text Search engine to store data in Unicode format, set the charset configuration value to utf8 (see “Modifying the Configuration Parameters”).
If you issue wildcard searches against data in Unicode
format, turn on trace flag 15. For more information, refer to “Setting Trace Flags”,
