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

  • From: "Justin Cave (DDBC)" <jcave@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 10:45:38 -0700

I'm assuming that you're looking at using UTF-8 for the database character set 
here and storing all the text in CHAR or VARCHAR2 columns.  I don't foresee any 
problems in that sort of configuration, so long as your client NLS_LANG 
settings correctly identify the encoding of the incoming data.

If you are contemplating storing data in NCHAR or NVARCHAR2 columns with a 
UTF-16 encoding, you would need to account for the additional storage 
requirements (English characters take two bytes rather than 1 byte as in 
UTF-8).  On the other hand, string operations on fixed-width data are faster 
than string operations on variable-width data, so the extra storage space 
requirements are a tradeoff.

Justin Cave
Distributed Database Consulting, Inc.
http://www.ddbcinc.com/askDDBC

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of William R. Jones
Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2004 9:29 AM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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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