Unicode ------- http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q294169 """ For many of these Unicode functions, the ODBC Programmer's Reference provides incorrect or ambiguous descriptions for some of the function arguments. Specifically, this problem relates to arguments that are used to specify the length of character string input and output values." Regardless of what the documentation says for each ODBC function, the following paragraph from the Unicode section of "Chapter 17: Programming Considerations" in the ODBC Programmer's Reference is the ultimate rule to use for length arguments in Unicode functions: "Unicode functions that always return or take strings or length arguments are passed as count-of-characters. For functions that return length information for server data, the display size and precision are described in number of characters. When a length (transfer size of the data) could refer to string or nonstring data, the length is described in octet lengths. For example, SQLGetInfoW will still take the length as count-of-bytes, but SQLExecDirectW will use count-of-characters." This means that if the argument in question describes the length of another argument that is always a string (typically represented as a SQLCHAR), then the length reflects the number of characters in the string. If the length argument describes another argument that could be a string or some other data type (typically represented as a SQLPOINTER), the length is in bytes. """ Driver Support" * PostgreSQL seems to correct use UCS-2. http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-odbc/2006-02/msg00112.php * MS SQL Server on Windows & Linux. Obviously correctly uses UCS-2. SQL Server 2012 and higher now support UTF16. * mysql: Seems to be broken. To handle this, probably need to provide a 'charset' option that causes us to convert to the given charset and use the ANSI/ASCII calls and data types. http://mysqlworkbench.org/?p=1399 * FreeTDS http://www.freetds.org/userguide/unicodefreetds.htm Definitely use 0.91 or later. Have seen reference to a new --wide-unicode flag for 0.92+ (broken in 0.91) which causes SQL_WCHAR to equal wchar_t instead of UTF16.