UTF-8 (UCS Transformation Format, 8-bit form) is an international character set that supports more than 650 of the world’s languages. UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding of the Unicode standard using 8-bit sequences. UTF-8 supports all ASCII code values, from 0 to 127, as well as values from many other languages. Each nonsurrogate code value is represented in 1, 2, or 3 bytes. Code values beyond the basic multilingual plane (BMP) require surrogate pairs and 4 bytes.
Adaptive Server, Oracle, IBM UDB, and Microsoft SQL Server data servers all support UTF-8.
