Multibyte characters with NVARCHAR

To store multibyte character data in an NVARCHAR column, your database locale must support a code set with these same multibyte characters.

When you store multibyte characters, make sure to calculate the number of bytes that are needed. The max parameter of the NVARCHAR data type refers to the maximum number of bytes that the column can store.

Because one multibyte character uses several bytes for storage, the value of max bytes does not indicate the number of logical characters that the column can hold. The total number of multibyte characters that you can store in the column is less than the total number of bytes that the column can store. Make sure to declare the max value of the NVARCHAR column so that it can hold enough multibyte characters for your purposes.

HCL OneDB™ supports the SQL_LOGICAL_CHAR configuration parameter, which can enable logical-character semantics in the declarations of NVARCHAR and other built-in character data types. For more information, see Data definition statements.