Locale and UTF-8 support

Vertica supports Unicode Transformation Format-8, or UTF8, where 8 equals 8-bit.

Vertica supports Unicode Transformation Format-8, or UTF8, where 8 equals 8-bit. UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. UTF-8 can represent any universal character in the Unicode standard. Initial encoding of byte codes and character assignments for UTF-8 coincides with ASCII. Thus, UTF8 requires little or no change for software that handles ASCII but preserves other values.

Vertica database servers expect to receive all data in UTF-8, and Vertica outputs all data in UTF-8. The ODBC API operates on data in UCS-2 on Windows systems, and normally UTF-8 on Linux systems. JDBC and ADO.NET APIs operate on data in UTF-16. Client drivers automatically convert data to and from UTF-8 when sending to and receiving data from Vertica using API calls. The drivers do not transform data loaded by executing a COPY or COPY LOCAL statement.

UTF-8 string functions

The following string functions treat VARCHAR arguments as UTF-8 strings (when USING OCTETS is not specified) regardless of locale setting.

String function	Description
`LOWER`	Returns a `VARCHAR` value containing the argument converted to lowercase letters.
`UPPER`	Returns a `VARCHAR` value containing the argument converted to uppercase letters.
`INITCAP`	Capitalizes first letter of each alphanumeric word and puts the rest in lowercase.
`INSTR`	Searches string for substring and returns an integer indicating the position of the character in string that is the first character of this occurrence.
`SPLIT_PART`	Splits string on the delimiter and returns the location of the beginning of the given field (counting from one).
`POSITION`	Returns an integer value representing the character location of a specified substring with a string (counting from one).
`STRPOS`	Returns an integer value representing the character location of a specified substring within a string (counting from one).