ADABAS supports the usage of national special characters (such as the German umlauts) in the database.
Any ASCII data is internally stored according to ISO 8859/1.2.The pertinent code table is included in the Appendix - Character Set ISO 8859/1.2.
The following is true for the input, output, and sort of national special characters:
- Windows NT usually works with character sets that deviate from the standard code ISO 8859/1.2 (such as IBM code pages 850, 437); i.e., Windows NT uses other codes for national special characters. Therefore a mapping of codes must be defined for each local or remote SERVERDB which is to be accessed by Windows NT database applications (ADABAS components or programs). This can be obtained by the definition of a "terminal character set table" (TERMCHAR SET) in the ADABAS database (see Section Mapping National Special Characters).
- For the case that certain national special characters cannot be represented with the code page currently used in Windows NT, a language-specific table for the mapping of codes can be defined in order to be able to output national special characters in an alternative notation (see Section Representability of National Special Characters).
- In the ADABAS database, characters or character strings are sorted according to the code ISO 8859/1.2; i.e., if national special characters in a sorted output are to be ordered in a way different from this code, then a language-specific table for the mapping of codes must be defined for this purpose (see Section Sorting National Special Characters).
- For modifications which might be necessary for other systems (e.g., UNIX) to be used to access an Windows NT SERVERDB via REMOTE SQL or within a distributed database, see the ADABAS Installation manuals for the corresponding systems.
It depends on the Windows NT system definitions (see Windows NT documentation) which character set (code page) is currently used on the particular Windows NT system.