UNICODE 2.x and UTF-8 Support

It is not clear to me whether Unicode 2.x and utf-8 or UCS-2 encodings are
available and working okay at this time.  Can anyone explain?  

I get the impression that UTF-8 is available for the backend but not the
frontend.  I also get the impression that only ISO 8895-1 through 5 so far
work.  If UTF-8 and ISO-8859-7 are not available on the client, how do you 
get the non ISO-8859-1 data into and out of the database ?

Could I build the database so that the default format is UNICODE if the 
user takes no further action regardless of any locale settings ?
What happens when you do backups, searches and sorting ?  Are 
there any restrictions on table and column names (do they have to be
7-bit ASCII for instance) ?

R Street