Multibyte Character Sets

In multibyte character sets, a wider range of characters is available for use in identifiers.

For example, on a server that has the Japanese language installed, you can use the following types of characters as the first character of an identifier: Zenkaku or Hankaku Katakana, Hiragana, Kanji, Romaji, Cyrillic, Greek, or ASCII.

Although Hankaku Katakana characters are allowed in identifiers on Japanese systems, SAP recommends that you do not use them in heterogeneous systems. These characters cannot be converted between the EUC-JIS and Shift-JIS character sets.

The same is true for some 8-bit European characters. For example, the character “Œ,” the OE ligature, is part of the Macintosh character set (code point 0xCE), but does not exist in the ISO 8859-1 (iso_1) character set. If “Œ” exists in data being converted from the Macintosh to the ISO 8859-1 character set, it causes a conversion error.

If an object identifier contains a character that cannot be converted, the client loses direct access to that object.