Multibyte Characters

This manual does not attempt to show the actual appearance of multibyte characters in text, examples, or diagrams. Instead, the following convention shows abstractly how multibyte characters are stored:

A1...An

One to four identical uppercase letters, each followed by a different superscript number, represent one multibyte character. The superscripts show the first to the nth byte of the multibyte character, where n has values between two and four. For example, the following symbols represent a multibyte character that consists of two bytes:

A1A2

The following notation represents a multibyte character that consists of four bytes (the maximum length of a multibyte character):

A1A2A3A4

The next example shows a string of multibyte characters in an SQL statement:

CREATE DATABASE A1A2B1B2C1C2D1D2E1E2;

This statement creates a database whose name consists of five multibyte characters, each of which is two bytes long. For more about using multibyte characters in SQL identifiers, see Naming Database Objects.