Re: Storing multilingual characters in Oracle

From: Ana Choto <achoto_at_american.edu>
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 10:32:17 -0400
Message-ID: <OF64BD6597.973BEC0B-ON85256FF2.004D4CBD-85256FF2.004FF1D9@american.edu>

We had tons of problems with al32utf8 character set. Some applications won't work with this character set. When we imported the data from our production database to our 9i database created with al32utf8 lots or records were not imported.

We ended up recreating our 9i database with WE8ISO8859P1 and UTF8 and we haven't had any problems anymore.

PARAMETER                                 VALUE


------------------------------                  --------------

NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET              UTF8
NLS_CHARACTERSET                          WE8ISO8859P1

We have another 9i database with the default character set. But, as I said before some of our application won't run here.

PARAMETER                     VALUE


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET  AL16UTF16
NLS_CHARACTERSET        AL32UTF8

Thanks

Ana E. Choto
American University
e-Operations - Information Technology
Phone (202) 885-2275

Fax (202) 885-2224

                                                                           
             Sandeep Dubey                                                 
             <dubey.sandeep_at_gm                                             
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Our database currently storing english characters now needs to store lanaguages like chinese, korean and Japanese. NLS_CHARACTERSET is currently WE8ISO8859P1. I need to store multilingual characters in approximately 20% of the tables. There are three options:

Alter the columns to NCHAR. =20
Alter database charachter set AL32UTF8
Create a new database with AL32UTF8 charcter set and do export import.

Are there any known issues of using Nchar on Oracle 9.2.0.4? I found on a metalink note recommending NOT to use nchar and rather change character set. Anyone has any bad experience with Nchar/Nvarchar2?

Is WE8ISO8859P1 a strict subset of AL32UTF8?=20

Or Option 3 is the best way to go. I am trying to avoid this option because of outage time I have to take for export and import.

Please share your experience.

Regards,

Sandeep Dubey
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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Fri Apr 29 2005 - 10:37:35 CDT