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.