Unicode Considerations for SAP BW and SAP R/3-ECC

SAP uses UTF-16 encoding in its Unicode system. The server uses UTF-8 and handles all conversions between the two encoding schemes. The server may not need to be configured for Unicode when accessing the SAP Unicode system.

NLS settings for the server must be configured in such a way that the server code page can handle the list of chosen languages. For example, ISO 8859-1 can accommodate most Western European languages. The 8859 family can handle character specifics with the lower set almost being mapped to US ASCII. Therefore, with 8859-1 one could request English, German, French, and Spanish. When a character set requires a code page that takes more than one byte per character (for example, many Asian languages), the only choice for the server is 65001 (UTF-8).

The adapters provide access to Unicode SAP BW and SAP ECC systems, respectively. This extends support of data and metadata in multiple languages to the server, consistent with support by the SAP server. A synonym can be created using one or more languages. Those languages are used to create titles and descriptions.

For SAP BW, the userid and password in the sapserv.cfg file must be able to connect to SAP BW using the enumeration of desired languages.
For SAP R/3-ECC, the server logon language is used to retrieve all languages.

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