IGNOU BCA 4th sem Solved Assignment - Explain the advantage of of Unicode

Explain the advantage of of Unicode

Ans

Advantage 10 includes three new data types which store Unicode characters. nChar is a fixed length Unicode string, nVarChar is a variable length ( trailing spaces are not returned ) Unicode string and nMemo is an unlimited Unicode character string. Each of these fields is supported in SQL WHERE clause, ORDER BY and GROUP BY statements. You can specify Unicode parameter values and use SQL scalar functions.

Advantage stores the Unicode data using UTF-16 encoding. This provides for an efficient use of space and performance. However, because UTF-16 uses two bytes (16 bits) for every character, it is a less efficient mechanism for storing Latin based characters. 
Additional files are required to support Unicode, aciu.dll and icudt40l.dat. The aicu.dll contains the Unicode functions used by Advantage and Unicode collations are stored in the .dat file. These files take up approximately 15MB of disk space and must be distributed with both the client and server when using Unicode field types

• Unicode is a 16-bit system which can support many more characters than ASCII.

• The first 128 characters are the same as the ASCII system making it compatable.

• There are 6400 characters set aside for the user or software.

·         Unicode is a 16-bit system, supporting 65,636 different characters.

·         Unicode is used in countries like Japan, because of the number of characters in their alphabet.

There are still characters which have not been defined yet, future-proofing the system.