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
- Standard Oracle 8.1.5 Installation with NLS_CHARACTERSET and
NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET = UTF8
- No Changes made to Oracle Client/Net8
