Using Oracle NCHAR/NVARCHAR2/NCLOB datatypes in Oracle 8i

From: Wes Gamble <w.gamble_at_pentasafe.com>
Date: 7 Jan 2003 09:27:55 -0800
Message-ID: <37fe2b65.0301070927.3dc4d67d@posting.google.com>

Thanks for any help in advance.

I am working for a software vendor and we are moving to support Oracle in a new release of our product. In the hopes of making our internationalization effort easier, we wanted to use the NCHAR/NVARCHAR/NCLOB datatypes to store our string data since these are guaranteed to store data in Unicode in Oracle 9i.

However, in Oracle 8i, according to the Oracle 9i Globalization Support document, "NCHAR types in Oracle 8 and Oracle 8i were designed to support special Oracle specific fixed-width Asian character sets."

QUESTION: Is there any harm in using the NCHAR/NVARCHAR/NCLOB datatypes to store string data in Oracle 8 as well as in Oracle 9?

I understand that these data types are bound to whatever the NLS settings are for the database server, and that data stored in these columns will not be stored in Unicode (unless of course the customer has that configured as their NLS character set.

Thanks,
Wes Gamble Received on Tue Jan 07 2003 - 11:27:55 CST