Most software systems now use UTF-8 as the standard character encoding and have done for some time. The Wlatin-1 encoding is very limiting, even in Europe (no Polish characters, for example). I am migrating everything to UTF-8. . SAS needs to make this easier. The fixed-width text variables must expand to four times their previous size to allow for the very rare 4-byte characters. Disk usage explodes. Is a new dataset file format planned? Databases have had international varchars for a long time. How about an option which makes UTF-8 the default for everything so we do not have to change all the code, the lengths and so on? . I also have a case open with tech support which I am almost certain is related to UTF-8 issues with the ODBC engine.