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As commerce becomes global, the need for data to span and bridge geographic, cultural, and linguistic barriers is expanding rapidly. Along with this need is the requirement to support multiple languages, dialects, and alphabets—and their associated electronic representations—within a universal data lake.
Across the information technology realm, Unicode has evolved to become the accepted universal standard that governs the consistent encoding, representation, and transmission of electronic text. Maintained by the Unicode Consortium, UTF-8 is by far the most prevalent encoding on the Internet, being used in more than 95 percent of websites.
Traditionally, OneFS has always supported Unicode encoded filenames with a length of up to 255 bytes. However, depending on the encoding type, this limit can constrain the number of characters in a filename to a range of 63 to 255 Unicode characters. This constraint can be an impediment for certain languages such as Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and so forth, and can create issues for customers who work with international languages that use multibyte UTF-8 characters.
Examples of common workflows that can experience challenges with long filename support include:
Some international languages use up to 4 bytes per character, so a filename of 255 bytes could be limited to as few as 63 characters when certain languages are used on a OneFS cluster.
To address this issue, the OneFS long filenames feature supports names consisting of up to 255 Unicode characters by increasing the maximum filename length from 255 to 1,024 bytes. It also allows for specifying the maximum number of characters per name for instances where a filename is composed of multibyte characters, for example UTF-8. In conjunction, the long filenames feature increases the OneFS maximum path length from 1,024 to 4,096 bytes.