ASA Database Administration Guide
  International Languages and Character Sets
    Understanding character set translation

Connection strings and character sets

Connection strings present a special case for character set translation. The connection string is parsed by the client library, in order to locate or start a database server. This parsing is done with no knowledge of the server character set or language.

The interface library parses the connection string as follows:

1. It is broken down into its keyword = value components. This can be done independently of the character set, as long as you do not use the curly braces {} around CommLinks (LINKS) connection parameters. Instead, use the recommended parentheses (). Curly braces are valid follow bytes (bytes other than the first byte) in some multibyte character sets.

2. The server is located. The server name is interpreted according to the character set of the client machine. In the case of Windows operating systems, the ANSI character set is used. Extended chars can be used unless they cause character set conversion issues between the client and server machines.

   For maximum compatibility among different machines, you should use server names built from alphabetic or numeric ASCII characters 0 to 127 (or 33 to 126) and the underscore, using no punctuation characters. Server names are truncated at 40 characters.

3. The DatabaseName (DBN) or DatabaseFile (DBF) connection parameters are interpreted in the database server character set.

4. Once the database is located, the remaining connection parameters are interpreted according to its character set.