Recently, database vendors have begun to support Unicode data types natively in their systems. With Unicode support, one database can hold multiple languages. For example, a large multinational corporation could store expense data in the local languages for the Japanese, U.S., English, German, and French offices in one database.

Not surprisingly, the implementation of Unicode data types varies from vendor to vendor. For example, the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 implementation of Unicode provides data in UTF-16 format, while Oracle provides Unicode data types in UTF-8 and UTF-16 formats. A consistent implementation of Unicode not only depends on the operating system, but also on the database itself.