Tivoli Directory Server supports a wide variety of national language characters through the UTF-8 (UCS Transformation Format) character set. As specified for the LDAP Version 3 protocol, all character data that is passed between an LDAP client and a server is in UTF-8. Consequently, the directory server can be configured to store any national language characters that can be represented in UTF-8. The limitations on what types of characters can be stored and searched for are determined by how the database is created. The database character set can be specified as UTF-8 or it can be set to use the server system's local character set (based on the locale, language, and code page environment).
If you specify UTF-8, you can store any UTF-8 character data in the directory. LDAP clients running anywhere in the world (in any UTF-8 supported language) can access and search the directory. In many cases, however, the client has limited ability to properly display the results retrieved from the directory in a particular language/character set. There is also a performance advantage to using a UTF-8 database because no data conversion is required when storing data to or retrieving data from the database.
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