Oracle9i - Unicode

What is Unicode?
Unicode is a universal encoded character set that allows you to store information from any language using a single character set.

Extended Unicode Enablement

Unicode provides a unique code value for every character, regardless of the platform, program, or language.
The Unicode standard has been adopted by many software and hardware vendors, many operating systems and browsers now support Unicode.
Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, JavaScript, LDAP, CORBA 3.0,
WML, and it is also compliant to ISO/IEC 10646 standard.
Oracle started supporting Unicode as a database character set in Oracle7.
In Oracle9i, Unicode support has been greatly expanded so that customers can find the right solution for their globalization needs.
Oracle9i supports Unicode 3.0, the third and most recent version of the Unicode standard.

Unicode Encoding
There are two common ways to encode Unicode 3.0 characters:
UTF-16 Encoding
UTF-8 Encoding

UTF-8 Encoding

This is the 8-bit encoding of Unicode. It is a variable-width multibyte encoding in which the character codes 0x00 through 0x7F have the same meaning as ASCII.
One Unicode character can be 1-byte, 2-bytes, or 3-bytes in this encoding.
Generally characters from the European scripts are represented in either 1 or 2 bytes, while characters from most Asian scripts are represented in 3 bytes.

UTF-16 Encoding

This is the 16-bit encoding of Unicode.
It is a 2 byte fixed-width encoding in which
the character codes 0x0000 through 0x007F have the same meaning as ASCII.
OneUnicode character is 2-bytes in this encoding. Characters from all scripts arerepresented in 2 bytes.