Unicode Support All DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET data providers support Unicode as specified in the .NET Framework SDK. Effectively, this means that the data providers use Unicode UTF-16 encoding to represent characters. The data provider converts UTF-16 characters to the format used by the database and returns .NET Framework strings to the application. For example, if an Oracle database code page is in UTF-8 format, the Oracle data provider uses UTF-8 to represent characters sent to the database. The data provider then converts the UTF-8 characters to be returned before sending them back to the application. For more information about the .NET Framework implementation of Unicode and international characters, refer to the Microsoft .NET Framework SDK documentation.