SAP Sybase IQ provides collations using multibyte character sets.
SAP Sybase IQ supports variable-width character sets. In these sets, some characters are represented by one byte, and some by more than one, to a maximum of four bytes. The value of the first byte in any character indicates the number of bytes used for that character, and also indicates whether the character is a space character, a digit, or an alphabetic (alpha) character.
For the UTF8 collation, UTF-8 characters are represented by one to four bytes. For other multibyte collations, one or two bytes are used. For all provided multibyte collations, characters comprising two or more bytes are considered to be “alphabetic”, and can be used in identifiers without requiring double quotes.
SAP Sybase IQ does not support 16-bit or 32-bit character sets such as UTF-16 or UTF-32.
All client libraries other than embedded SQL are Unicode-enabled, using the UTF-16 encoding. Translation occurs between the client and the server.