The driver supports Unicode data types. Table 23-3 shows how the Teradata data types map to the Unicode data types, but only when CharacterSet is set to UTF-16.
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.