Your products are globalized and support Unicode. Software AG strongly recommends choosing a Unicode encoding for your database and the most appropriate sort order for your environment. A database character set determines which languages a database can represent. Database sort order determines collation and comparison behavior.

The sections below list the most appropriate Unicode character encoding and sort order for each RDBMS that your products support. If you want to use a different character set or sort order than recommended below, consult your database administrator and your RDBMS vendor's documentation so you can carefully choose a database character set that supports the languages your data is in.

If you use the Database Component Configurator to create your database components, you can check whether the selected RDBMS is configured for the Unicode character set. If the RDBMS does not support Unicode, the configurator lists the character set the RDBMS does support.