PL/SQL: Using Unicode Datatypes.

I have RTFM and still am confused. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

From
OracleŽ Database Globalization Support Guide 10g Release 1 (10.1)
Part Number B10749-02

"Your SQL statements and PL/SQL code contain Unicode data. You must use a Unicode database. SQL statements and PL/SQL code are converted into the database character set before being processed. If the SQL statements and PL/SQL code contain characters that cannot be converted to the database character set, then those characters are lost. A common place to use Unicode data in a SQL statement is in a string literal."

I want my database to be able to store Unicode data, specifically I want to do it through Unicode Datatypes instead of a Unicode database.  I have many reasons for this with the major one being I only need a handful of columns to support this data type. From the excerpt above it seems that I will run into problems if I stay with my 8bit western encoding and choose AL16UTF16 as my national character set if I used stored packages and procedures?

If anyone can obviate this for me it would be greatly appreciated.

TFD Received on Mon Oct 25 2004 - 17:02:44 CDT