Sharing data across national and language boundaries is a challenge for multi-national businesses. Traditionally, each computer stores and renders text based on its locale specification. A locale identifies the local language and cultural conventions such as the formatting of currency and dates, sort order of the data, and the character set encoding to be used on the computer. The encoding of a character set refers to the specific set of 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 that has a different locale.
The Unicode Standard was developed to enable 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 a single encoding form, Unicode enables users to correctly view character data created on computers with different locale settings.
Users whose computers are set up in different languages can work with the same database. For example, using alias tables in their respective languages, users in Taiwan can view database reports displaying Chinese characters while users in France can view the same reports in French characters.
User-defined character sets (UDC) are not supported and the Chinese National Standard GB 18030-2000 is not supported.