DB2 Code Pages: Don't Get Lost in Translation

(Robert Catterall) For a long time, many of us in the DB2 community didn't pay a whole lot of attention to code pages (referring to the standard representations of numbers and letters and other characters within computer systems). There didn't seem to be much of a reason to think about this particular topic. Data went into the database and came out of the database just fine, so what was the big deal about coded character set translation? Oh, sure, everyone knew that an ASCII-based system could exchange data with an EBCDIC-encoding server, and translation had to happen in such cases, but it worked all right. In any case, there were more pressing concerns like database design, performance tuning, and availability planning.