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About Siebel Unicode Support

Upgrades: All Siebel upgrades.

Environments: Development, production test, production.

Databases: All databases.

For Western European languages and Japanese, Oracle's Siebel applications support both non-Unicode and Unicode code pages. For all other supported languages, Siebel applications support only Unicode code pages.

Unicode is recommended if your installation uses Siebel Email Response, correspondence, or similar functionality, particularly if content is generated on a separate system.

This is because Siebel applications use Unicode internally. If the RDBMS is not using Unicode, Siebel applications convert content from Unicode to the database code page. Using a Unicode code page for the database prevents string conversion problems on text content.

Before converting to Unicode, your encryption method must be RC2 or AES.

CAUTION:  Migrating to Unicode is more complex than simply importing your existing data into a Unicode database. Failure to execute the migration correctly can result in serious data corruption or unrecoverable data loss. For this reason, Oracle's Siebel Expert Services participation is mandatory. Contact Expert Services to perform a Unicode migration.

For a list of supported languages and code pages, see System Requirements and Supported Platforms on Siebel SupportWeb.

For information about Unicode and global deployment for Siebel Business Applications, see Global Deployment Guide.

For information on upgrading to RC2 encryption, see Security Guide for Siebel Business Applications.

Planning Considerations for the Unicode Migration

Migrations to Unicode require the assistance of Oracle's Siebel Expert Services.

Contact Expert Services to migrate your upgraded database from a non-Unicode code page to Unicode. To perform the migration, you can use either database vendor native utilities or Siebel utilities.

If you are planning to migrate your upgraded application to Unicode, consider the following points:

• Database size increase. Migration to Unicode increases the size of your database. For this reason, you need to allocate additional space for your database before migrating to Unicode. For more information, contact Oracle's Siebel Technical Support or Oracle's Siebel Expert Services.
• IBM DB2 data truncation. Migration to Unicode may cause truncation of certain data in DB2 databases. In the past, long columns with a type of varchar could have a maximum length of 16,383 characters. However, in Unicode, the maximum length of long columns with a type of varchar is 16,350. During the migration to Unicode, long columns of type varchar that exceed 16,350 are truncated. To prevent this, you can perform tasks to identify which data may be truncated and take appropriate measures before migration. For more information, contact Oracle's Siebel Technical Support or Oracle's Siebel Expert Services. See also Identifying IBM DB2 Long Columns for Truncation in a Siebel Upgrade.
• IBM DB2 custom tablespace information. The upgrade does not preserve custom tablespace information for DB2 databases. This presents a problem during your migration to a Unicode code page, because you need to know which tables need to be re-created. You must modify the upgrade scripts to handle custom tablespaces.

  Contact Oracle's Siebel Technical Support or Oracle's Expert Services for instructions about how to modify upgrade scripts to handle custom tablespaces.

• Third-party product integration. Migration to Unicode may affect integration with third-party systems. For more information, contact Oracle's Siebel Technical Support or Oracle's Siebel Expert Services.
• Handheld and wireless support. Certain handheld and wireless application platforms do not support Unicode. For more information, contact Oracle's Siebel Technical Support or Oracle's Siebel Expert Services.
• Environment code pages. You cannot use a non-Unicode code page for your development environment, and then later migrate to Unicode for your production environment.

Supported Types of Unicode

The current release supports two types of Unicode:

• UTF-8. UTF-8 uses the same encoding for Western European languages. It occupies one byte for Western European languages and up to three bytes for some Asian languages, such as Japanese.
• UCS-2. UCS-2 is supported for IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server databases. UCS-2 does not map one-to-one with Western European languages. It occupies two bytes for all languages.