Oracle 9i 92010 National Character set: AL16UTF16

[markco]

I'm install Oracle92010 EE DB.
1) Oracle9i 92010 only allow using AL16UTF16 or UTF8 as National Character Set? While Oracle8i allow user to choose other value as National Character Set.

2) If I need to use unicode to support traditional chinese and simplified chinese, which unicode character set I should use? AL32UTF8 or UTF8? What is the different?

3) What is the different charactor set between WE8MSWIN1252 and WE8ISO8859P1? Which one is superset?

4) How to create Database template of Oracle Database configuration Assistant?

Pls help!!! Markco Wong

 

[Abhivyakti]

hi there,

There is a little difference in between teh UTF16 adn UTF8 in the way they will store the data. Also one is variable length while the other is fixed length.

Also there are 2 ways youcan design your database to incorporate NLS support for Unicode.

One is 'Unicode Database'
other is 'Unicode is column support.'

In the first variation, even normal char adn varchar also will allow you to store the unicode values. For this you will have to set some parameters for the databse in init.ora.

for the second version , where you have to specifically use the unicode support datatypes like NCHAR, NVARCHAR2 or NCLOB. Here only these columns will allow you to store unicode data adn other normal columns like char or varchar2 will not allow you to store teh unicode data.

For more information you go to oracle site for unicode documentation....may be the name of the pdf file will be something like 'Globalization Support for 9i'

Hope this gives you some hints to get what you want.

If i would have been a DBA i would have helped you more. But this is all i know.

Abhivyakti

 

[Abhivyakti]

hi again,

I m almost pasting a whole article i found just now on stylusinc.net

hope this will also help.


Oracle9i - Unicode
What is Unicode?
Unicode is a universal encoded character set that allows you to store information from any language using a single character set.

Stylus Systems is a Bangalore India based web development company. This and the other articles on this site might help you to decide to use our services.


Extended Unicode Enablement


Unicode provides a unique code value for every character, regardless of the platform, program, or language.
The Unicode standard has been adopted by many software and hardware vendors, many operating systems and browsers now support Unicode.
Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, JavaScript, LDAP, CORBA 3.0,
WML, and it is also compliant to ISO/IEC 10646 standard.
Oracle started supporting Unicode as a database character set in Oracle7.
In Oracle9i, Unicode support has been greatly expanded so that customers can find the right solution for their globalization needs.
Oracle9i supports Unicode 3.0, the third and most recent version of the Unicode standard.

Unicode Encoding
There are two common ways to encode Unicode 3.0 characters:
UTF-16 Encoding
UTF-8 Encoding

UTF-8 Encoding

This is the 8-bit encoding of Unicode. It is a variable-width multibyte encoding in which the character codes 0x00 through 0x7F have the same meaning as ASCII.
One Unicode character can be 1-byte, 2-bytes, or 3-bytes in this encoding.
Generally characters from the European scripts are represented in either 1 or 2 bytes, while characters from most Asian scripts are represented in 3 bytes.

UTF-16 Encoding

This is the 16-bit encoding of Unicode.
It is a 2 byte fixed-width encoding in which the character codes 0x0000 through 0x007F have the same meaning as ASCII.
OneUnicode character is 2-bytes in this encoding. Characters from all scripts are represented in 2 bytes.