UNICODE is an international standard character set. The UNICODE character set provides a unique representation for all characters used in alphabets. The ASCII character set, on the other hand, is suited primarily for use with English and Central European characters.
The MaxDB database system supports UNICODE in accordance with ISO 10646. Database instances can use UNICODE for the database catalog and application data. The data for this is stored internally in the UTF-16/UCS-2 format. This requires twice as much storage space as saving the data in ASCII format, since the coding is 16-bit rather than 8.
See also:
Concepts of the Database System, Creating a Database Instance
Reference manual, Code Attribute