Learn how to migrate data from a non-Unicode database to a Unicode database.
Written by Mohankumar Saraswatipura
Editor's note: This article is an excerpt from the book DB2 10.1/10.5 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows Database Administration (Exams 611 and 311): Certification Study Guide.
Both BLU and pureScale require databases to be Unicode, so you should create all new databases as Unicode. Chances are good that the requirement to convert data to a Unicode code set will happen. Because a database cannot be altered to a different code set, this will mean you must unload and load the data.
In the past, string units of character data have been stored in a relational database in bytes. So for a single-byte character set (SBCS), each character represents one byte. The string unit of the column data type is a byte, sometimes referred to as an octet.