Unicode Character Encoding

Vertica supports Unicode Transformation Format-8, or UTF8, where 8 equals 8-bit. UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. UTF-8 can represent any universal character in the Unicode standard. Initial encoding of byte codes and character assignments for UTF-8 coincides with ASCII. Thus, UTF8 requires little or no change for software that handles ASCII but preserves other values.

Vertica database servers expect to receive all data in UTF-8, and Vertica outputs all data in UTF-8. The ODBC API operates on data in UCS-2 on Windows systems, and normally UTF-8 on Linux systems. JDBC and ADO.NET APIs operate on data in UTF-16. Client drivers automatically convert data to and from UTF-8 when sending to and receiving data from Vertica using API calls. The drivers do not transform data loaded by executing a COPY or COPY LOCAL statement.

See Implement Locales for International Data Sets in the Administrator's Guide for details.