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Available within the next two quarters, i.e., before October 1997
UCS-2 is due to be included as an alternate wchar datatype in the up-coming Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Beta release.
Informix had "no public information at this time". Informix was unwilling to comment on their current or future Unicode plans for this survey. Therefore, they will not be included in the remainder of this report.
It is commonly known from trade publications that Informix is currently combining Illustra functionality with their main SQL engine to produce a more robust Informix Universal-Server
Illustra has the "Systext" datatype, which is 2 bytes. Some developers are using this datatype for raw Unicode storage and manipulation using user-defined functions (UDFs) [22] for character processing.
"Future" means planned, funded, and available more than 6 months from now
UCS-2 as a Unicode datatype is being designed into future releases of both Sybase SQL Server and Oracle. Sybase will be adding a new double-byte UCS-2 datatype to SQL Server and possibly SQL Anywhere. Oracle is planning on making the NATIONAL CHARACTER, or NCHAR datatype configurable to be UCS-2 on a per-database basis.
The author was unable to get through the Computer Associates product marketing chain of command in a timely manner for inclusion of data about CA-OpenIngres in this report. According to their literature [23], they should be able to create a UTF-8 implementation fairly easily using existing multi-byte functionality.
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