Re: VARCHAR: characters or bytes?

From: Bob Fazio <rfazio_at_home.com.nospam>
Date: 2000/05/10
Message-ID: <AsbS4.181986$Tn4.1407993@news1.rdc2.pa.home.com>#1/1

Since I don't work with others that much, and I'm not going to look it up. But I am fairly confident that it is Characters, but characters of the type used when the database was created.

SQLWKS> select * from v$nls_parameters;

PARAMETER                                                        VALUE
---------------------------------------------------------------- -----------
-----------------------------------------------------
NLS_LANGUAGE                                                     AMERICAN
NLS_TERRITORY                                                    AMERICA
NLS_CURRENCY                                                     $
NLS_ISO_CURRENCY                                                 AMERICA
NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS                                           .,
NLS_CALENDAR                                                     GREGORIAN
NLS_DATE_FORMAT                                                  MM/DD/RRRR
HH:MI:SSAM
NLS_DATE_LANGUAGE                                                AMERICAN

NLS_CHARACTERSET
WE8ISO8859P1

NLS_SORT                                                         BINARY

NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET
WE8ISO8859P1
11 rows selected.

The character type was set when the database was created.

--
Robert Fazio, Oracle DBA
rfazio_at_home.com
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"Art Decco" <pleasedont_at_email.com> wrote in message
news:8eo63d$fev$1_at_goodnews.macromedia.com...


> When you define a field as a varchar(24), does that give it room for up to

> 24 bytes of text data, or does it give it room for up to 24 characters of

> data? After all, not all encodings are single-byte.

>

> In particular, we're thinking of using a UTF-8 (Unicode) database to hold

> global customer data. We're converting the data from a previous,

 non-Unicode


> encoding. (Actually several databases, and several different encodings.)

 We


> don't want the data to overflow the field when converted, nor do we want

 the


> new field to be too narrow for new data. If a column has type varchar with

 a


> width of 24 and we convert it to UTF-8 using the same schema, that would

> only be enough room for about eight Japanese kanji in UTF-8 if varchar is

> measured in bytes, but it would be plenty if 24 referred to characters

> instead of bytes. Does anybody know for sure which it is? I've heard lots

 of


> opinions, but nobody seems to really know.

>

> Thanks.

>

>

Received on Wed May 10 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT