Character Encodings

Set the character encoding at the database level, the table level, or the column or parameter level.

For example, the default encoding for your database might be set to UTF-8 but one table in that database might explicit set the encoding to SHIFT-JIS. One column in this table might have the encoding explicitly set to ISO-8859-1 while all the other columns do not specify the encoding, so they inherit the default encoding of SHIFT-JIS from the table.

The Integration Appliance can convert from type of encoding to another during run time. For example, the orchestration might read in input data from a table with the encoding set to ISO-8859-1 and then write out that data to a column set to UTF-8.

To set character encodings:

See the table below for descriptions of the default character encoding types.
Note: You must leave the encoding field blank for the following binary Datatypes:
  • Blob
  • Binary
  • Varbinary

To set the encoding type, choose from one of the following options:

Some of the default encoding types are listed in the following table:
Table 1.
Encoding Description
UTF-8 UTF-8 is a standard character encoding for Unicode or ISO-10646. Both of these standards assign a single unique number to each character used in modern languages. This is the default encoding.
US-ASCII Also known as ASCII, this is the basic character encoding used on Windows and UNIX computers.
ISO-8859-1 Also known as Latin1, this encoding includes ASCII plus characters for many Western European languages.
EBCDIC-XML-US This is the basic character encoding used on IBM® computers. EBCDIC-US, like ASCII, is a US-based character encoding.
SHIFT-JIS Also known as Katakana, specifies the Japanese language.
Note: Some double-byte characters are not converted using the SHIFT-JIS encoding. For more information, see Using the Shift-JIS encoding.