Re: Changing Coded Character Set (CCSID)

["Joe Sam Shirah" <jshirah@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    Hi Ivan,

    "Graphic" is IBM lingo: "A graphic string is a sequence of two-byte
characters."  I assume you're using the SQL ALTER statement.  If so, you can
change the data type from character to graphic and change the CCSID as well.
Assuming your job CCSID is not 65535, the data will be converted to Unicode
( UCS-2 ).

    You can also copy DDS, change the character types to graphic, create the
new empty file, then use cpyf with *MAP to converrt.  There's also a
VARGRAPHIC type, analogous to VARCHAR.

    Doing this will improve performance ( usually, depending on the type of
application ), and can have an impact on memory usage if you bring over a
lot of data.  There are also downsides, the most obvious being twice the
disk space for most western languages - the AS/400 only supports UCS-2 and
not UTF-8 as of V5R2.  OTOH, if you are setting up for i18n apps, you don't
have to have different tables for different languages, which is a real
programming/maintenance advantage.  It should be clear that there is no
impact on numeric values.

    For some table types, like a symbol table, UCS-2 is a no brainer.  HTH,

> Do you Yahoo!?

        No.

                                                  Joe Sam

Joe Sam Shirah -        http://www.conceptgo.com
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Ivan Hurtado" <iva030@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "Java Programming on and around the iSeries / AS400"
<java400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2004 5:00 PM
Subject: Re: Changing Coded Character Set (CCSID)


> I have an update. After continued messing around with
> this, I found that I can't change the CCSID for
> character table columns, but I can however change it
> for Graphics table columns to 13488. I assume that I
> can then use these graphics col types to store my
> unicode character data. Anyone have any tips/advice? I
> will try it out to see.
>
> Thanks,
> Ivan
>
> --- Ivan Hurtado <iva030@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > I am trying to change the CCSID for a table to
> > 13488,
> > which supports Unicode characters. According to Don
> > Denoncourt, this is a performance optimization that
> > helps substantially because you no longer have to
> > perform ASCII-2-EBCDIC and vice-versa conversions
> > behind the scenes every time you access data.
> > However,
> > my system does not appear to support this
> > encoding...
> >
> > Does anyone know what I can do to allow me to use
> > CCSID 13488? Is there a certain OS release/version
> > that will support this? I am on V5R2.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Ivan
> >