In a non-Unicode system, the character sets of the server and clients are native character sets; therefore, you can use the Adaptive Server direct conversions.
However, there are some character sets for which there is no Adaptive Server direct conversion; in this situation, you must use Unicode conversions.
If all character sets in your client/server system fall into column 1 of Table 8-1, use the Adaptive Server direct conversions. The character sets must all belong to the same language group.
If the character sets in your client/server system fall into column 2 of Table 8-1, or some combination of columns 1 and 2, then you must configure your server to use Unicode conversions. Again, the character sets must all belong to the same language group.
For example, assume the server default character set is CP 850 and the clients’ character sets are either ISO 8859-1 or ROMAN 8. Table 8-1 shows that direct conversions exist between CP 850 and the client character sets. Now, suppose you add a client using CP 1252 to this configuration. Since there is no direct conversion between CP 1252 and CP 850, (the default server character set), you must use Unicode conversions to convert between CP 1252 and CP 850. When you have a mixture of character sets—some where you can use Adaptive Server direct conversions and others where you must use Unicode conversions—you can specify that a combination of Adaptive Server direct conversion and Unicode conversion be used.
