Re: Unicode Character Allocation

> To confirm, if the database is set to UTF-8 and I were to create a
> field varchar2(100 BYTES) the max it could be is 100 bytes? Oracle will
> not interpret this as "100 UTF-8 bytes" (which would be 400)?

Oracle will interpret VARCHAR2(100 BYTES) as 100 *bytes* of storage...no more bytes than that will be allowed.

As you know, multibyte charactersets can require between 1 and 4 bytes of storage per character, depending on that character. So if you want to store 100 UTF-8 characters, then define the column as VARCHAR2(100 CHAR). BYTES means max bytes.....CHAR means max characters.

The BYTES and CHAR designations came out in Oracle 9i. Personally, I've never seen a need to specify BYTES. When I create my VARCHAR2 column, I denote the max number of characters the column can hold, no many how many bytes that may be.

HTH,
Brian

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Brian Peasland
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