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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: Reading English text in multi-byte character set DB - Any Issues?
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_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of William R. Jones
Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2004 9:29 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
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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