Hello!
It is unfortunate that Express is not meeting your requirements for your POC, but our sales team has contacted you to discuss options that work for you. If you haven't heard from them let us know.
As an aside, our recommended way of connecting to the Denodo Platform is to use JDBC, as it is faster than ODBC and generally easier to configure. What client tool are you using to connect to Denodo?
We are also currently reviewing the decision to limit Unicode identifiers in the Express edition and will notify the community as soon as we reach a decision.