Multilingual ODBC applications can be developed on any operating system using the driver to access both Unicode and non-Unicode enabled data stores. The driver is fully Unicode enabled. On Linux platforms, the driver supports both UTF-8 and UTF-16.

On Windows platforms, the driver supports UCS-2/UTF-16 only. 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.

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 Internationalization, localization, and Unicode for related details.