Selecting Database Character Sets

The primary character set decision that you must make when installing a PeopleSoft implementation is which character set to use for the database system. Ideally, all databases are encoded in Unicode; however, in some cases Unicode requires several bytes to represent each character when only one byte may be required in a non-Unicode character set. Therefore, the PeopleSoft system enables you to use certain non-Unicode character sets for the database.

By using a Unicode encoded database, you can maintain a single database with data in any combination of languages. A single PeopleSoft application server can serve multiple users connecting to the mixed-language database, regardless of the language or character set of those users’ client machines. The only restriction on a user’s ability to access mixed-language data is the capability of the user’s client workstation to interpret, display, and accept keyboard entry of the characters from the various languages.

Most language or region-specific non-Unicode character sets provide sufficient characters for only a few languages. If you create a non-Unicode database, you must ensure that all of the characters for all of the languages that you plan on using can be represented in the character set that you choose.

The following table lists whether a PeopleSoft language is supported in a Unicode or non-Unicode database character set:

Language Code	Language	Database Character Set
ARA	Arabic	Unicode
BUL	Bulgarian	Unicode
CFR	Canadian French	Unicode or non-Unicode
CRO	Croatian	Unicode
CZE	Czech	Unicode
DAN	Danish	Unicode or non-Unicode
DUT	Dutch	Unicode or non-Unicode
ENG	US English	Unicode or non-Unicode
FIN	Finnish	Unicode or non-Unicode
ESP	Spanish	Unicode or non-Unicode
FRA	French	Unicode or non-Unicode
GER	German	Unicode or non-Unicode
HUN	Hungarian	Unicode
ITA	Italian	Unicode or non-Unicode
JPN	Japanese	Unicode or non-Unicode
KOR	Korean	Unicode
NOR	Norwegian	Unicode or non-Unicode
POL	Polish	Unicode
POR	Portuguese	Unicode or non-Unicode
ROM	Romanian	Unicode
RUS	Russian	Unicode
SER	Serbian	Unicode
SLK	Slovak	Unicode
SLV	Slovenian	Unicode
SVE	Swedish	Unicode or non-Unicode
THA	Thai	Unicode
UKE	English	Unicode or non-Unicode
ZHS	Simplified Chinese	Unicode
ZHT	Traditional Chinese	Unicode

Depending on the data that you store and how the database stores Unicode characters, a Unicode database can be significantly larger than a non-Unicode database. However, only the storage of character data is affected; the space that is required for non-character data, such as numbers and dates (which are stored by the database system as numbers), is not affected.

Depending on the database platform, you can use one of the four character set types (SBCS, nonshifting DBCS, shifting DBCS, or Unicode) when creating the database. However, the number of characters that you can store in each column is affected greatly by the type of character set that you choose for the database encoding.