Re: Reading English text in multi-byte character set DB

From: Tanel Põder <tanel.poder.003_at_mail.ee>
Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 19:32:35 +0200
Message-ID: <109701c4020e$af3329a0$a2a623d5@porgand>

Hi,

If you plan to store your text in VARCHAR2's, I see no real problem here, except dealing with variable width charsets consumes somewhat more cpu than with fixed width ones (in case of variable width charset Oracle has to check every byte in string raw data to find of how many bytes does a character consist).

But, generally VARCHAR2 & variable multibyte character sets (like UTF8 and AL32UTF8) work fine together.

If you plan to store variable width multibyte charsets in CLOB's, there is one more issue, all characters will be converted to two-byte fixed width format in CLOB columns. This means if 98% of your text is english (shoud normally fit into one byte), you'll waste a lot of space.

If you need any more information about LOB issues then check my presentation "LOB Internals and Performance Tuning" from http://integrid.info/Poder_LOB_Internals.pdf

Tanel.

Original Message ----- From: "William R. Jones" <william.jones_at_aawc.com> To: <oracle-l_at_freelists.org> Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2004 6:29 PM Subject: Reading English text in multi-byte character set DB - Any Issues?

> We are in the process of creating a new data warehouse to replace (and
expand on) an older one. The database will be an Oracle 9i RAC with Data Guard (logical standby) setup.
>
> There are near-term future plans for adding text, address information from
other languages (i.e., Portuguese, Spanish, French and possibly Japanese and Chinese addresses). If we go to a multi-byte setup (e.g., double-byte), will we encounter any problems with storing and reading English text?
>
> Also, are there any other issues that anyone has encountered using a
multi-byte character set on an Oracle database that is primarily (98+ %) storing English text?
>
> Regards,
>
> William
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Received on Thu Mar 04 2004 - 12:08:43 CST

Re: Reading English text in multi-byte character set DB - Any Issues?