Hello it’s may be a daft question but… We have a 3tier thin client over WAN Axpata 3SP2 we use unicode for multilingual propose. does unicode affect the bandwidth requirements between the Client and the AOS? have a nice day Alfa
Hi, The answer is - yes. If set incorrectly - If you do not initialise database (when you create) for unicode and subsequently enable ‘Initialise database for unicode’ setting in Axconfig tool, then you can expect a major degradation in performance. If set correctly - Even if you set the settings correctly, you can expect moderate performance degradation even if you use Oracle or MS SQL Server. For more info on this, do please do a search in Technet articles with keyword ‘unicode’. Hope this helps, Harish Mohanbabu
Thanks for your reply I agree with you that unicode has influence on the database itseft (I read rechnet articles 
) if set correctly, do I need to double the required bandwidth between the thin client and the AOS? (as the sizing guide looks to be written for single character set)
Hi Alfa There is a document on the Axapta 3.0 installation CD about Unicode. There they say: “A slight performance degradation has been measured using the benchmark tool of Axapta. Using a unicode setup on Oracle requires 1% more CPU power on the database. An increase of only 1% is also seen on the AOS. The number of disk writes on the database server is increased by 2%. On MS-SQL server 2000, database backend CPU requirements are unaltered, the AOS requires approx 8% more CPU, and the number of disk writes on the database server is increased by 18%.” No word about AOS, but I’m sure you can measure it via the System Monitoring form.
Hi Alfa, The general rule of thumb from Microsoft - * 1 ISDN 64kbps would be able to handle 10 ASU (ie 100 sales order with a total of 500 saleslines over a period of 1 hour) & * Demand for latency should be < 50ms on the communication line (preferably) But I am not too sure whether Microsoft considered use of unicode in the above case. So I guess the decision whether to increase bandwidth/latency (not just bandwidth) should be decided by conducting proper testing using performance measurement and benchmark tool. Helmut - I saw one white paper on the similar lines in Technet website as well. Would be thankful if you answer my following queries - * And I don’t remember seeing any mention of hardware or testing scripts used. By any chance is there any mention of these details in the document in CD? Please let me know. * According to SQL Server BOL, more space would be required to store unicode data. Mainly because each character would be encoded by using 2 bytes (using around 65,536 different patterns). But there is no mention of this in the white paper. Am I missing anything here? Regards, Harish Mohanbabu