The Google BigQuery driver is fully Unicode enabled. On UNIX and Linux platforms, the driver supports both UTF-8 and UTF-16. On Windows platforms, the Google BigQuery driver supports UCS-2/UTF-16 only.
The driver supports the Unicode ODBC W (Wide) function calls, such as SQLConnectW. This allows the Driver Manager to transmit these calls directly to the driver. Otherwise, the Driver Manager would incur the additional overhead of converting the W calls to ANSI function calls, and vice versa.
See "UTF-16 Applications on UNIX and Linux" for related details. For a more detailed explanation of Unicode, refer to Internationalization, localization, and Unicode in the Progress DataDirect for ODBC Drivers Reference.
