Double-byte character sets (DBCS)

A double-byte character set defines the encoding for characters on two bytes. The size of a character is always two bytes.

Example of double-byte character sets include UCS-2, used by SQL Server in NCHAR and NVARCHAR columns. Note that UTF-16 is not a (fixed) double-byte character set: You can have characters encoded on 2 or 4 bytes. UCS-2 is actually a subset of UTF-16.

Note that Genero Business Development Language does not support double-byte character sets.