Irfan's World

January 25, 2011

What is Unicode and non Unicode data formats?

Filed under: Data Warehouse — Tags: , — Irfan @ 12:33 am

In my earlier post, I have explained about data. In this post, I am going to explain you some basics about Unicode and non Unicode formats:

Unicode :
A Unicode character takes more bytes to store the data in the database. As we all know, many global industries wants to increase their business worldwide and grow at the same time, they would want to widen their business by providing services to the customers worldwide by supporting different languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic. Many websites these days are supporting international languages to do their business and to attract more and more customers and that makes life easier for both the parties.

To store the customer data into the database the database must support a mechanism to store the international characters, storing these characters is not easy, and many database vendors have to revised their strategies and come up with new mechanisms to support or to store these international characters in the database. Some of the big vendors like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and other database vendors started providing the international character support so that the data can be stored and retrieved accordingly to avoid any hiccups while doing business with the international customers.

The difference in storing character data between Unicode and non-Unicode depends on whether non-Unicode data is stored by using double-byte character sets. All non-East Asian languages and the Thai language store non-Unicode characters in single bytes. Therefore, storing these languages as Unicode uses two times the space that is used specifying a non-Unicode code page. On the other hand, the non-Unicode code pages of many other Asian languages specify character storage in double-byte character sets (DBCS). Therefore, for these languages, there is almost no difference in storage between non-Unicode and Unicode.

Encoding Formats:
Some of the common encoding formats for Unicode are UCS-2, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 have been made available by database vendors to their customers. For SQL Server 7.0 and higher versions Microsoft uses the encoding format UCS-2 to store the UTF-8 data. Under this mechanism, all Unicode characters are stored by using 2 bytes.

Unicode data can be encoded in many different ways. UCS-2 and UTF-8 are two common ways to store bit patterns that represent Unicode characters. Microsoft Windows NT, SQL Server, Java, COM, and the SQL Server ODBC driver and OLEDB provider all internally represent Unicode data as UCS-2.

The options for using SQL Server 7.0 or SQL Server 2000 as a backend server for an application that sends and receives Unicode data that is encoded as UTF-8 include:

For example, if your business is using a website supporting ASP pages, then this is what happens:

If your application uses Active Server Pages (ASP) and you are using Internet Information Server (IIS) 5.0 and Microsoft Windows 2000, you can add "<% Session.Codepage=65001 %>" to your server-side ASP script. This instructs IIS to convert all dynamically generated strings (example: Response.Write) from UCS-2 to UTF-8 automatically before sending them to the client.

If you do not want to enable sessions, you can alternatively use the server-side directive "<%@ CodePage=65001 %>".

Any UTF-8 data sent from the client to the server via GET or POST is also converted to UCS-2 automatically. The Session.Codepage property is the recommended method to handle UTF-8 data within a web application. This Codepage setting is not available on IIS 4.0 and Windows NT 4.0.

Sorting and other operations :

The effect of Unicode data on performance is complicated by a variety of factors that include the following:

1. The difference between Unicode sorting rules and non-Unicode sorting rules
2. The difference between sorting double-byte and single-byte characters
3. Code page conversion between client and server

Performing operations like >, <, ORDER BY are resource intensive and will be difficult to get correct results if the codepage conversion between client and server is not available.

Sorting lots of Unicode data can be slower than non-Unicode data, because the data is stored in double bytes. On the other hand, sorting Asian characters in Unicode is faster than sorting Asian DBCS data in a specific code page, because DBCS data is actually a mixture of single-byte and double-byte widths, while Unicode characters are fixed-width.

Non-Unicode :

Non Unicode is exactly opposite to Unicode. Using non Unicode it is easy to store languages like ‘English’ but not other Asian languages that need more bits to store correctly otherwise truncation will occur.

Now, let’s see some of the advantages of not storing the data in Unicode format:

1. It takes less space to store the data in the database hence we will save lot of hard disk space.
2. Moving of database files from one server to other takes less time.
3. Backup and restore of the database makes huge impact and it is good for DBA’s that it takes less time

Non-Unicode vs. Unicode Data Types: Comparison Chart

The primary difference between unicode and non-Unicode data types is the ability of Unicode to easily handle the storage of foreign language characters which also requires more storage space.

Non-Unicode Unicode
(char, varchar, text) (nchar, nvarchar, ntext)
Stores data in fixed or variable length Same as non-Unicode
char: data is padded with blanks to fill the field size. For example, if a char(10) field contains 5 characters the system will pad it with 5 blanks nchar: same as char
varchar: stores actual value and does not pad with blanks nvarchar: same as varchar
requires 1 byte of storage requires 2 bytes of storage
char and varchar: can store up to 8000 characters nchar and nvarchar: can store up to 4000 characters
Best suited for US English: "One problem with data types that use 1 byte to encode each character is that the data type can only represent 256 different characters. This forces multiple encoding specifications (or code pages) for different alphabets such as European alphabets, which are relatively small. It is also impossible to handle systems such as the Japanese Kanji or Korean Hangul alphabets that have thousands of characters."1 Best suited for systems that need to support at least one foreign language: "The Unicode specification defines a single encoding scheme for most characters widely used in businesses around the world. All computers consistently translate the bit patterns in Unicode data into characters using the single Unicode specification. This ensures that the same bit pattern is always converted to the same character on all computers. Data can be freely transferred from one database or computer to another without concern that the receiving system will translate the bit patterns into characters incorrectly.

I think I should stop here, I will go on writing otherwise.


What is data ? How it is stored in Database ?

Filed under: Data Warehouse — Tags: — Irfan @ 12:29 am

Today, I am going to explain you a little about data. This four letter character is a huge topic that cannot be explained in a single post. I will try to keep it concise. In addition to that, we will see different types of data encoding schemes, their use in businesses. During this era where many companies all building their data warehouses by supporting Unicode or non Unicode formats, this topic has been highly discussed by DBA’s or Data Architect’s to support their projects and is top in their discussion list. In this post, I am leaning more towards Microsoft SQL Server and how it is used.?

Data :

A set of characters belonging to a language plus some special characters from a keyboard.

For example, A character set of English Language may contain letters from A..Z, numbers, punctuations, commas, ampersand, plus, minus, hyphen, backslash, tilde, ENTER, SHIFT and other special characters.

How Character data is stored:

In a computer, characters are represented by different patterns of bits being either ON or OFF.

There are 8 bits in a byte, and the 8 bits can be turned ON and OFF in 256 (28) different patterns. A program that uses 1 byte to store each character can therefore represent up to 256 different characters by assigning a character to each of the bit patterns.

There are 16 bits in 2 bytes, and 16 bits can be turned ON and OFF in 65,536 unique patterns. A program that uses 2 bytes to represent each character can represent up to 65,536 (216) characters.

Single-byte code pages (SBCS) are definitions of the characters mapped to each of the 256 bit patterns possible in a byte. Code pages define bit patterns for uppercase and lowercase characters, digits, symbols, and special characters such as !, @, #, or %. Each European language, such as German or Spanish, has its own single-byte code page. Although the bit patterns used to represent the Latin alphabet characters A through Z are the same for all the code pages, the bit patterns used to represent accented characters such as ‘é’ and ‘á’ vary from one code page to the next.

For example, If data is exchanged between computers running different code pages, all character data must be converted from the code page of the sending computer to the code page of the receiving computer. If the source data has extended characters that are not defined in the code page of the receiving computer, data is lost. When a database serves clients from many different countries/regions, it is difficult to pick a code page for the database that contains all the extended characters required by all the client computers.

The common encoding formats used to store the data are American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) and IBM’s Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC). Mostly these codes were used to represent a common language like English.

The advancement of technological challenges arose to support International Languages for global audience, a committee came with a new type of encoding format i.e. Unicode. There are different types of Unicode formats available such as UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 and similarly UCS-2 used by SQL Server.

In order to support multiple languages around the world, Microsoft came up with their own UCS-2 encoding scheme to store and compare the data multiple language data in the database and it gave rise to a concept called Collation that will unique identify database’s language, sort rules, code page etc..

In brief, I have taken some excerpts about collation from Microsoft website that is shown below:


English meaning of Collation from : assembling in proper numerical or logical sequence

A collation encodes the rules governing the proper use of characters for either a language, such as Greek or Polish, or an alphabet.

A SQL Server collation defines how the database engine stores and operates on character and Unicode data.

The physical storage of character strings in Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 is controlled by collations. A collation specifies the bit patterns that represent each character and the rules by which characters are sorted and compared.

Collation Properties:

  • The sort order to use for Unicode data types (nchar, nvarchar, and ntext). A sort order defines the sequence in which characters are sorted (ascending or descending), and the way characters are evaluated in comparison operations. (<, >, =, <=, >=, < > ).
  • The sort order to use for non-Unicode character data types (char, varchar, and text).
  • The code page used to store non-Unicode character data.

SQL Server database collations can be specified at many levels :

  • When you install an instance of SQL Server database, you specify the default collation for that instance.
  • Each time you create a database, you can specify the default collation used for the database. If you do not specify a collation, the default collation for the database is the default collation for the instance.
  • Whenever you define a character column, you can specify its collation. If you do not specify a collation, the column is created with the default collation of the database.


SortRules (Language Character Set) 

A string identifying the alphabet or language whose sorting rules are applied when dictionary sorting is specified. Examples are Latin1_General or Polish.


Specifies uppercase preference.


Specifies a one- to four-digit number that identifies the code page used by the collation. CP1 specifies code page 1252, for all other code pages the complete code page number is specified. For example, CP1251 specifies code page 1251 and CP850 specifies code page 850.


CI specifies case-insensitive, CS specifies case-sensitive.


AI specifies accent-insensitive, AS specifies accent-sensitive.

Specifies the binary sort order to be used.


Codepages are usually defined to support specific languages or groups of languages which share common writing systems. For example, codepage 1253 provides character codes required in the Greek writing system.

The order of the character codes in a codepage allows the system to provide the appropriate character code to an application like ASP.NET or Web Services.

When a new codepage is loaded, a set of different character codes are provided to the application. In Windows, codepages can be changed on-the-fly by the user, without changing the default system language in use. An application can determine which codepages a specific font supports and then can present language options to the user.

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