The Universal Encoding Support in Adabas for zIIP Version 8.3.5 can use the alternative code page conversion subsystem ICS.

ICS is based on International Components for Unicode (ICU V58.2), an open source project initiated by IBM (see http://site.icu-project.org/). ICU is already being used with other Software AG products like Natural (on mainframes) or Adabas on Linux, UNIX and Windows.

For the time being, Software AG's Entire Conversion Services (ECS) is the default code page conversion subsystem for mainframe Adabas but will be retired and replaced by ICS in a future release.

ADAICS is delivered in the Adabas for zIIP load library in conjunction with codepage modules of ICS in a separate load library ICS221. For details, see Data Sets Required for UES Support.

If ICS is to be used, both load libraries need to be in the load library concatenation for the nucleus or utility job step. For details, see JCL Required for UES Support (z/OS) in the Operations documentation.

Special zap AY835165 needs to be applied to switch to using ICS instead of ECS. The zap is located in the source library member ZAPTOPT.

ICS does not require the SMARTS run-time system (APSxxx). ICS provides the same code pages as ECS does.

ICS should work better in the zIIP environment compared to ECS because it can run on zIIP processors and therefore will incur fewer mode switches. This will be noticeable for code page conversions involving unicode or multi-byte encodings.