The PowerCenter Integration Service runs in the following modes:
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). The US-ASCII code page contains a set of 7-bit ASCII characters and is a subset of other character sets. When the PowerCenter Integration Service runs in ASCII data movement mode, each character requires one byte.
Unicode. The universal character-encoding standard that supports all languages. When the PowerCenter Integration Service runs in Unicode data movement mode, it allots up to two bytes for each character. Run the PowerCenter Integration Service in Unicode mode when the source contains multibyte data.
You can also use ASCII or Unicode data movement mode if the source has 8-bit ASCII data. The PowerCenter Integration Service allots an extra byte when processing data in Unicode data movement mode. To increase performance, use the ASCII data movement mode. For example, if the source contains characters from the ISO 8859-1 code page, use the ASCII data movement.
The data movement you choose affects the requirements for code pages. Ensure the code pages are compatible.