Unicode and HDBODBC32 odbc driver

[patrickbachmann]

Hi folks,

I have some data inside HANA that appears to be unicode.  For example character '2013 EN DASH' which appears as very similar to a normal dash.  When I run SQL to retrieve the value I have no problems as HANA is unicode and my value is returned.  When I attempt to run exact same SQL against HANA db via Microstrategy or via Excel front end using ODBC driver HDBODBC32 to connect to HANA I get the following error;

General error;-10427 Conversion of parameter/column (3) from data type NVARCHAR to ASCII failed.

My question is whether this or any other ODBC driver can or should be able to handle unicode character conversion? 

I have confirmed the character that is the problem is definitely an EN DASH.

Any help is greatly appreciated as always.

Thanks,

-Patrick

[former_member602336]

Hi,

unfortunately we have still this issue (it occurs since we moved to HANA B1 9.3 PL05 in Dec 2018). We tried the solution with ALPHANUM but the problem still occurs.

In our case UPS Worldship has an ODBC connection to a view in the HANA database which works fine for most characters, but in some cases with special ones, like this č or this š the connection fails and we have to enter the shipping information manually.

Has anyone an other idea to solve this?

[lbreddemann]

Most likely this is due to the implicit UTF -> ASCII conversion required by the ODBC standard.

See e.g. the answer to the same problem https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38969669/why-does-sqlquery-from-sap-hana-using-rodbc-return-no-d... .

Simply setting the CHAR_AS_UTF8 setting to TRUE should fix this issue.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Patrick,

I have never used Microstrategy,but I had a similar problem with the ODBC in one of our custom applications. I had to cast the field to the a more appropriate data type. In my case I cast the field as an ALPHANUM.

Example:

CAST ("FIELD_DESCRIPTION" as ALPHANUM) as "FIELD_DESCRIPTION"

http://help.sap.com/hana/html/sqlmain.html

Regards,

Andy

[patrickbachmann · Accepted solution]

Hi Andrew, I tried your suggestion but got the same error.  In Microstrategy we were able to get some of the bad characters to work by choosing a setting at the application level.  We choose NON UTF8 setting and it worked for some extended ASCII characters such as 2013 EN DASH. However true unicode characters like U+2446D still do not work in microstrategy windows desktop client.  But we've discovered since that the web version of microstrategy does support unicode and is working for all characters.  As far as using excel, I have not gotten any of these characters to work, however I was just using it for testing purposes. 

Thanks for your comments!

-Patrick

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

In regards to Excel.

You might try what Tomas is suggesting in this this thread:

http://scn.sap.com/thread/2066796

Good Luck!

Andy

[Former Member]

Hi Patrick,

I have the same error. Did you resolved the problem ???

Thanks,

Jihen

[patrickbachmann]

We got this to work using the web version of Microstrategy which is unicode compatible.