Re: Restructuring program to cope with modern database layouts

Sorry for the slight detour, but this thread has got me wondering: how does
the database implement variable-byte encodings like UTF-8?

I hadn't thought much about it because the tables that I'd defined with
CCSID 1208 were specifically intended for processing through ODBC, and in
that context, I was never dealing with bytes, only characters.

But for fields with a fixed number of characters, how does the database
handle the possibility of variable number of bytes? If I have a
CHARACTER(10) field, do I just get 10 bytes, and if some characters need
more than 1 byte, then I effectively get fewer than 10 characters? Does it
just truncate after 10 bytes, even if it's in the middle of a character?

John Y.