What's nchar, nvarchar, nclob ... for?

Hi,
From the documentation provide by oracle, I 'guess' that every datatype start with a character has to do with national character set. I thought that if you gonna to store characters in non-English, for example, Chinese, Korean, etc., you'll need to use these type. But to my surprise, I manage to store Chinese text in a CLOB field. (I never tried NCLOB though), and when I create the database, I even just use the default which is US7ASCII for both Character Set and National Character Set. So my question is, what good is these type start with n for? And does your setting in National Character Set affect anything?

Thanks and best regards
Lee Received on Tue Jan 16 2001 - 05:39:44 CST