As a European SQL system, ADABAS puts special emphasis on supporting the various special characters in the individual European alphabets (e.g., the German umlauts).
These special characters present two sorts of problems: their representation on the terminal and their internal sorting.
For presenting these special characters, conversions are necessary because not all hardware manufacturers use the ISO-ASCII character set. ADABAS therefore provides configurable conversion tables (TERMCHAR SET) which can be activated specifically for each session depending on the type of terminal. The correct input and output and the correct internal storage can thus be achieved even in a heterogeneous hardware, terminal, and PC environment.
To be able to sort these special characters according to the user's conventions and not according to the often arbitrary internal codes, ADABAS provides configurable sorting tables. In these, it can be specified, for example, that for the German "ü" a sorting according to "ue" is desired. With the built-in function MAPCHAR, a virtual column can be generated from the stored data which sorts the data set in the desired manner.