Siebel Data Warehouse Installation and Administration Guide > Preinstallation Considerations for Siebel Data Warehouse > Deploying Siebel Data Warehouse in Latin-1 General, Unicode and Non-English Environments >

Code Page Overview

A code page contains the encoding to specify characters in a set of one or more languages. An encoding is the assignment of a number to a character in the character set. You use code pages to identify data that might be in different languages. For example, if you are importing Japanese data into a mapping, you must select a Japanese code page for the source data.

When you set a code page, the application or program for which you set the code page refers to a specific set of data that describes the characters the application recognizes. This influences the way that application stores, receives, and sends character data.

Choosing Code Pages

Choose code pages based on the character data you are using in mappings. Character data can be represented by character modes based on the character size.

Character size is measured by the amount of storage space a character requires in the database. Database character can be one of the following: single byte, double byte or multibyte.

Code Page Compatibility

Compatibility between code pages is essential for accurate data movement when the Informatica Server runs in the Unicode data movement mode. When two code pages are compatible, the characters encoded in the two code pages are virtually identical.

For accurate data movement, the data warehouse code page must be a superset of the source code page. If the source code page is a superset of the data warehouse code page, the Informatica Server cannot process the characters because they cannot be encoded in the data warehouse code page. The data warehouse then results in incorrect or missing data.