Unicode Support

The SQL Server Legacy Wire Protocol driver maps the Microsoft SQL Server data types to Unicode data types as shown in the following table:

SQL Server Data Type	Mapped to. . .
nchar	SQL_WCHAR
ntext	SQL_WLONGVARCHAR
nvarchar	SQL_WVARCHAR
nvarchar(max) 1	SQL_WLONGVARCHAR
sysname	SQL_WVARCHAR
xml 1	SQL_WLONGVARCHAR

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1

Supported only for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and higher.

The driver supports the Unicode ODBC W (Wide) function calls, such as SQLConnectW. This allows the Driver Manager to transmit these calls directly to the driver. Otherwise, the Driver Manager would incur the additional overhead of converting the W calls to ANSI function calls, and vice versa.

See “UTF-16 Applications on UNIX and Linux” for related details. Also, refer to Chapter 4 “Internationalization, Localization, and Unicode” in the DataDirect Connect Series for ODBC Reference for a more detailed explanation of Unicode.