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

Table 1. Teradata Unicode Data Types
Teradata Unicode
char () charset Unicode SQL_WCHAR
clob charset Unicode SQL_WLONGVARCHAR
varchar () charset Unicode SQL_WVARCHAR

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 Internationalization, localization, and Unicode in the Progress DataDirect for ODBC Drivers Reference for a more detailed explanation of Unicode.