When a client requests a connection, the client 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 send an error message to the client and continues with the logon process. If it does, then character set conversion is automatically enabled. If the default character set of the server is UTF-8, it automatically uses Unicode conversions. If the default is a native character set, the server uses ASE direct conversions, unless the user specifies that Unicode conversions be used.
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 converting the data, that is, without changing the encoding of the data.
To disable character set conversion at the server level, set the disable character set conversion parameter to 1. No conversion will occur for any client connecting to the server. By default this parameter is set to 0, which enables conversions.
You can also 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.
