Mike, something strange happened here: somewhere in between your ó is converted to a plain o. as you have created your column of type nchar(10) , it's padded by 9 spaces (0x20). you can try something like -- o INSERT INTO my_table chr(111); -- ó INSERT INTO my_table chr(243); commit; select COL2, dump(COL1, 16) from my_table; hth Martin Am 15.03.2011 um 16:08 schrieb Michael Schmitt: > Thanks All, > > I am still having a bit of a problem understanding how the > NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET is used though. This is an 11.2.0.1 database, and > below you can see the steps that I am running based on some of the feedback. > Since this is an nchar column, I was thinking we should get the 'ó' character > back. I am guessing there is something that I am not understanding correctly > about NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET, or something is not configured correctly > > PARAMETER VALUE > ------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- > NLS_CHARACTERSET US7ASCII > NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET AL16UTF16 > >> env |grep LANG > NLS_LANG=american_america.WE8MSWIN1252 > > SQL> create table my_table(col1 nchar(10)); > SQL> insert into my_table values(N'ó'); > SQL> select COL1,dump(col1, 16) col_dump from my_table; > COL1 > ---------- > COL_DUMP > ----------------------------------------------- > o > Typ=96 Len=20: 0,6f,0,20,0,20,0,20,0,20,0,20,0,20,0,20,0,20,0,20 > > Thanks, > Mike -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l