A client that is requesting a connection identifies its character set to Adaptive Server. Adaptive Server compares the client character set with its default character set, and if the two names are identical, no conversion is required. If the names differ, Adaptive Server determines whether it supports conversion between its default and the client’s character set. If it does not, it sends an error message to the client and continues with the login process. If it does, character set conversion is automatically enabled. If the default character set of the server is UTF-8, Unicode conversions are automatically used. If the default is a native character set, the server uses Adaptive Server direct conversions, unless the user requests Unicode conversions.
You can disable character set conversion at the server level. You may want to do this if:
All of your clients are using the same character set as the server default, and therefore, no conversion is required.
Conversion between the client character set and the server default is not supported.
You want to store data in the server without changing the encoding.
To disable character set conversion at the server level, set the disable character set conversion parameter to 1.
You can control character set conversion at the connection level using the set char_convert command from within a client session. set char_convert off turns conversion off between a particular client and the server. You may want to set char_convert off if the client and the server use the same character set, which makes conversion unnecessary. set char_convert on turns conversion back on.
