NLS_LANG

Dear Oracle administrators,

I was wondering if I could start a discussion here on the purpose and effects of the NLS_LANG environment variable, which was introduced when Oracle 7 came out. I'm only familiar with the Solaris/SunOS versions of Oracle 7, but I would expect this variable to be a part of at least other Unix versions as well.

I may sound nice, to be able to control the way the system behaves, by using customized settings for this variable, and I bet it is of great use in under many circumstances, but there are serious side effects that I've seen. We have a database that was created with an ISO-8859-1 character set. We try to make sure that an appropriate NLS_LANG variable is available to ALL users because if it isn't, all 8bit characters are ruined. I've seen data that was exported from the database system being totally corrupted (8 bit characters were stripped) because the NLS_LANG variable wasn't known to the exp program at the time. Actually, exp is in fact, corrupting the original data. I think this is going way too far, and that the NLS_LANG variable has been given to much power. At least: I would like to consider this as a *warning* to those that are trying to make use of exp for backup purposes.

Best regards,

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Gunnar Orvarsson                                 Internet:    gunnaro_at_hafro.is
Hafrannsoknastofnunin/Fiskistofa                 Telephone:   +354 5697909
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