unicode smp

Description

By default, the Oracle connector allows storage only of UCS-2 (or BMP) Unicode characters for the W packing code. Specify the Oracle option unicode_smp to enable storage of the entire Unicode range (or SMP) in W packing code fields.

If you use this option, UTF-16 surrogate pairs are used fo encoding, so 2 or 4 bytes are used to store each character.

For this reason, use unicode_smp only if needed, for example, when working with Chinese characters, or using attributes such as bold, italic, and underline.

More information about UTF-16 surrogate pairs is available in the Internet and in the Oracle® Database Globalization Support Guide.