Expanded Storage Space Requirements

Moving to a COBOL Unicode environment means that character data can potentially require three times the storage space that is required in a single-character environment, given the variable length of a character that is encoded in UTF-8 from one to three bytes. To allow for this, all internal data definitions for character-type data in COBOL programs must be expanded to allow for three times as many bytes. This expansion is critical because in a Unicode PeopleSoft database, column sizes are calculated based on a character length, not a byte length. So, a CHAR(10) column on a Unicode database allows the storage of 10 characters, regardless of how many bytes each character takes to store. Given the three-bytes-per-character maximum requirement of UTF-8 (four-byte UTF-8 characters are not yet supported by the PeopleSoft system), the maximum byte size of this CHAR(10) column is 30 bytes. Therefore, a COBOL type of PIC X(30) may be required to store the contents of a CHAR(10) field on a Unicode database.

The PeopleSoft system provides a COBOL conversion utility to automatically expand the character-data fields in the working storage to accommodate the number of bytes in the UTF-8 encoding scheme.