IBM System Z and Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Payroll With Unicode - Dramatic Unicode Performance Improvement on System z Servers

The PeopleSoft Enterprise Web Server and Application Server have been using the Unicode character encoding scheme since the early 2000s on PeopleSoft Version 8, but the option of using a Unicode Database Server was not available for System z customers until DB2 for z/OS V8.1. Starting in 2005 Oracle began to investigate the performance of the PeopleSoft Enterprise Payroll application in a Unicode database environment as some of their customers were considering a global implementation of their Payroll application and a Unicode database seemed to be the best approach if the performance proved to be acceptable.