About Unicode

Sharing data across national and language boundaries is a challenge for multinational businesses. Traditionally, each computer stores and renders text based on its locale specification. A locale identifies the local language and cultural conventions, such as currency and date format, data sort order, and character-set encoding. Encoding refers to the bit combinations used to store the character text as data, as defined by a code page or an encoding format. In Essbase, code pages map characters to bit combinations for non-Unicode encodings.

Because different encodings can map the same bit combination to different characters, a file created on one computer can be misinterpreted by another computer with a different locale.

The Unicode Standard enables computers with different locales to share character data. Unicode provides encoding forms with thousands of bit combinations, enough to support the character sets of multiple languages simultaneously. By combining all character mappings into one encoding form, Unicode enables users to correctly view character data created on computers with different locale settings.

Essbase conforms to version 2.1 of the Unicode Standard and uses UTF-8 encoding. See www.unicode.org.

Through its Unicode implementation, Essbase enables employees of global businesses to view, in their own languages, company information stored in Essbase databases. For example, using alias tables in their respective languages, users in Taiwan can view database reports in Chinese characters, and users in France can view the same reports in French characters.

The following topics describe the characteristics of the Essbase implementation of Unicode.

Note:

In Essbase, user-defined character sets (UDC) are not supported.