Unicode Support and Upgrade Process

With LNDB versions 1.2 and later, support is provided for storing Unicode (UTF-8) strings into the LNDB database. DBExport, DBImport, and QuickReports have also been Unicode-enabled. LoggerNet version 4.2 or later is required to enable the Unicode features of LNDB.

UTF-8 Unicode encoding includes characters from languages such as Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Korean, and many other languages of the world. For brevity, the UTF-8 character sets are not shown here.  For non-English UTF-8 character data to be created and stored within an LNDB database, the CRBasic program running on a datalogger must be modified to explicitly provide source data in the desired language using UTF-8/Unicode format.

LNDB deployments using Microsoft SQLServer databases require the Unicode-enabled versions of LoggerNet and LNDB to be installed, and then these will store Unicode strings automatically as soon as datalogger program modifications that use UTF-8 are implemented.

MySQL databases that are created new in LNDB v1.2 (and later) are automatically encoded using UTF-8, and therefore will also store any UTF-8 characters that arrive from a datalogger source (as long as a Unicode-enabled ODBC driver is used - see step 6. of the migration process below).  However, existing MySQL tables that were created using LNDB v1.0 or v1.1 are not encoded with UTF-8, and are not automatically converted to UTF-8 when LNDB v1.2 (or later) is installed and executed. These legacy database tables should be considered for migration to UTF-8 format, although migration is often not necessary.