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Binary-Ordered Compression for Unicode (BOCU) is a new, general compression format for Unicode. It has a number of important advantages over other compression mechanisms that make it well-suited for certain classes of applications, such as large databases. It compresses small strings well, such as individual fields in a database. These are situations where compression mechanisms like LZW do not work well; they are better suited to large bodies of text. In addition, BOCU preserves one very important characteristic: Unicode binary order. For many applications, it is very important that databases be able to have the same binary order for compressed Unicode fields as they do for uncompressed fields.

The Unicode Standard, while considered a single (yet huge) character set, can be represented by three encodings: UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32.

Binary trees are one of the most commonly used data structures where the data has some sort of natural order and fast searching is one of the requirements. A binary search tree is a binary tree organized specifically for searches. It is called so because a binary decision (decision with two outcomes) is made at each node. Each node of a binary tree has two pointers to the nodes below, one to the left and one to the right.