> Do other databases support both UTf8 and UTF16?
>
Oracle supports UTF-8, UTF-16 an some other special UFT encodings. I
think some of them are pre UTF-8 becoming ratified, hence they are
partially compatible.
It's an install time option for an Oracle database. ASCII databases
can be upgraded to UTF-8, but not vice versa, and it affects all
schema's in the database.
I had an oracle system that was non-unicode, some body wanted to
support the euro currency symbol. We tried it, it inserted fine, but
came back in a select as another character. The only option was custom
escaping all over the place, or migrating oracle. Given the amount of
regression testing that would be needed for all the apps on the oracle
system (200 users, 16 processor box, billions of dollars worth of
transactions) it was not worth the effort. People had to type 'EUR'
instead of €.