Configuring Your Database For Multilingual Reporting

IBM® Cognos® Business Intelligence is a Unicode product capable of querying data in many languages and encoding.

IBM Cognos BI typically queries the database using the native data encoding of the database (Latin-1, Shift-JIS, Unicode, and so on). IBM Cognos BI translates this data to Unicode as required.

When querying databases with two or more data encodings, Report Studio requests the data in Unicode. Certain databases require specific configuration of the client or server software to enable this capability. For more information, see your database vendor documentation.

Note: For information on round trip safety issues when characters are converted from Unicode to Shift-JIS and back, see the information on the Round Trip Safety Configuration utility in Round Trip Safety Configuration of Shift-JIS Characters.