Re: Restructuring program to cope with modern database layouts

Because of ongoing issues with national characters, a decision was agreed upon to migrate all the data to SQL created tables, using > "modern" features like varchar fields, and CSSID 1208, UTF-8. This should enable transparent passthrough of textual data for ODBC

Personally I've - when full unicode storage is required - standardized on UTF16 (CCSID 1200) with *NORMALIZE on to reach some sane form for the database layer.
And on CCSID 1208 when required by external serialization (text file, REST JSON api...).
Both are variable encodings, i.e. 2 or 4 bytes per codepoint for CCSID 1200, with 2 bytes able to represent usually he full BMP for any conceivable business purposes.
CCSID 1200 is displayable even on a 5250 in unicode mode (i.e. you can display cyrillic and arabic on the same screen), albeit not frequently seen on the field (unfortunately).

RPG will convert between CCSID during variable assignment, if cannot do it, usually will place x'3F' in EBCDIC target (substitution character).
Anyway many important downstream systems you have to talk in normal business settings (like couriers) usually are very restricted anyway, so it is better to transform any string using proper lib like ICU (QICU library on the /400), a transform call will remove umlauts, accents and so on...