Dutch characters in DB2 problem

Question

Ok, first of all, I have really limited knowledge about databases.

Problem that I have is next: I inserted few rows with data that contains Dutch characters, such as names of different countries. Some countries have at the end of their names Dutch language special characters ë, or like Ukraine have two dots on i (Servië, Oekraïne, Tunesië, Somalië, etc...). These characters in database looks like this: ë -> A≈ and ï -> AZ.

Of course I would like that these Dutch characters shows in database.

Answer 1

Well, the trick is that a database can only specify which "locale" it is used for at creation time. When you create a database you either specify what you want by specifying the codeset, territory and collation (example CREATE DATABASE MYDB AUTOMATIC STORAGE YES ON '/data' DBPATH ON '/dbdir' USING CODESET UTF-8 TERRITORY US COLLATE USING SYSTEM), or you let DB2 guess based on some system settings.

You can check what yours is set to by running db2 get db cfg for <db name>. In the case of what was used above you would see the following:

Database territory                                      = US
Database code page                                      = 1208
Database code set                                       = UTF-8
Database country/region code                            = 1
Database collating sequence                             = IDENTITY
Alternate collating sequence              (ALT_COLLATE) =

Note, that you cannot change these settings after a database is created. One option would be to export the data from your database (using db2export), drop and rebuild the database the with language settings you want, and then re-import the data (using db2import).

Another option would be to see if there is a way to represent your character strings as pure "bit" data and store the bit sequence rather than the "string" or declare a field as VARCHAR FOR BIT DATA and store your strings as bit sequences (though I'm not 100% positive on that one...).

Also check out the links below as they have more information on the language thing and how to deal with multi-code-page results. Note that some of this information requires DB2 to be at least at version 9.5 or higher.

• Choosing the code page, territory, and collation for your database
• Unicode character encoding
• Character conversion between different code pages

as well as check out the whole Multicultural support parent/sibling links related to that list link (the Character conversion between different code pages).