Multilingual JDBC applications can be developed on any operating system using the drivers to access both Unicode and non-Unicode enabled databases. Internally, Java applications use UTF-16 Unicode encoding for string data. When fetching data, the drivers automatically perform the conversion from the character encoding used by the database to UTF-16. Similarly, when inserting or updating data in the database, the drivers automatically convert UTF-16 encoding to the character encoding used by the database.
The JDBC API provides mechanisms for retrieving and storing character data encoded as Unicode (UTF-16) or ASCII. Additionally, the Java String object contains methods for converting UTF-16 encoding of string data to or from many popular character encodings.
