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Hi All,
We have a requirement wherein we will have a centralised transaction database for the Asian region. This database should be capable of storing data in multiple languages (as the transaction data in this database will be meant for multiple countries). Currently we are planning for English & Chinese data with option of Korean & Japanese in the future.
After going thru Oracle's NLS documentation we decided to have this centralised database with Database character set as UTF8 (as it can supports multiple languages).
For testing the data transfer in-between databases with different
character sets, we transferred data from a UTF8 database to a
Traditional Chinese database (ZHT16BIG5) database running on a Chinese
Windows NT.
But the tests for data transfer between this UTF database & a
Traditional Chinese database (ZHT16BIG5) were not successful.
The testing was done as follows:
1. Uploaded a text file containing Traditional Chinese characters on
the UTF8 database running on Standard English Windows NT
2. After Uploading the Data, Transferred the Data to a Traditional
Chinese database (ZHT16BIG5) database running on a Chinese Windows NT.
The data was transferred to the Chinese database by a PowerBuilder
application running on the English Windows machine. The data was
pumped into the Chinese Database from the English Database ( and was
not pulled by the Chinese DB from the English DB)
After the above steps were completed, we logged on to the Chinese DB using SQLPlus on the same Chinese machine. We queried the table to which the data was pumped. The Query returned the string with "?" for almost all characters in the string. The data type of the column into which the data was pumped is VarChar2.
After the above failure, we logged into the English UTF8 DB from the
Chinese Windows SQLPlus & we queried the database table into which the
Chinese data was uploaded ( in the step 1 from above). Still we got
the string with the same "?" question marks. Next we tried the convert
function with
Select (Column A, UTF8, ZHT16BIG5) from Table B;
and we got Chinese Text. But after looking carefully we found that the
text differed from the original text that was in the file. Most of the
characters displayed on the screen were different from those present
in the file.
What did we miss out ?
Any ideas why this happened or how to resolve this issues. Any help is appreciated.
TIA, Details of the two databases...............
DB1 - Centralised DB
- OS : Standard English Windows NT
DB2 - Test DB for Chinese language
- OS : Traditional Chinese Windows NT
Dataflow :
Chinese Characters in File -----> Uploaded by PB program running on Standard English Windows NT to a UTF8 DB -----> Pumped into ZHT16BIG5 DB by a PB program running on Standard English Windows NT (on the same machine containing the UTF8 DB) Received on Mon Jun 24 2002 - 02:33:40 CDT