RE: Positioning the Cursor, from the Toolbox

From: Joe Sam Shirah

    It was unfortunate to have to make that kind of trade off not just for
Java, but for I18N issues in general.  The good news, for I18N anyway, is
that as of V5R3, UTF-8 is supported.  The only downside is that for some
character sets UTF-8 actually requires *three* bytes.  Fortunately, those
are relatively rare.  For most languages, UTF-8 will use just one byte, so
shops using UCS-2 and those staying away from Unicode due to previously
having to use UCS-2 may want to convert/reconsider.

    Java will still convert to standard Unicode.

But that's no reason to store your data in Unicode.  If you are comfortable
using a single-byte code set, then reducing your disk space (typically by
about 30%, given numeric fields) is probably worth the conversion going in
and out of the database.  This is especially true if the bulk of your
processing logic is in RPG (as it should be IMO), since RPG is a single-byte
language.

Joe