Data Usage for Unicode Storage

Moving to a z/OS COBOL Unicode environment means that character data in COBOL programs, including numbers, dates and time, is stored and processed in the UCS-2 encoding of Unicode. IBM Enterprise COBOL uses special usage NATIONAL to store Unicode data, instead of usage DISPLAY.

The usage NATIONAL should be used for all storage and literal declarations, except for limited special cases. PeopleSoft has worked with IBM to ensure that all the statements that process string data can work with data fields declared with usage NATIONAL.

The PeopleSoft system provides a COBOL Unicode conversion utility for z/OS that automatically converts the data field usage for Unicode storage. When the file server is installed with the “Unicode database” option selected, the conversion utility runs behind the server transfer process, and JCL files pre-configured for compiling Unicode COBOL programs are copied to the server. The Unicode support is provided out-of-the box, with no additional configuration required.

Unlike Unicode COBOL on Unix and Microsoft Windows, there is no need to explicitly expand storage size for Unicode processing in the z/OS Unicode environment. To store ten characters on Db2 for z/OS, declare the database column as VARGRAPHIC(10). This column can be fetched into PIC N(10) field in Unicode COBOL programs running on z/OS.