Re: NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS=CHAR and column storage size

Laurenz Albe wrote:
> My company considers using UNICODE databases with
> NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS=CHAR to avoid problems inserting a value like
> 'Länge' into a CHAR(5) or VARCHAR2(5) column.
>
> Now I am concerned about space requirements of such a database
> because I don't understand enough about the storage of such columns.
>
> DATA_LENGTH for a CHAR(5) or VARCHAR2(5) column will be 20.
>
> - Does that mean that there will be 20 bytes reserved for this column
> in each row?
> - Is it possible that migrated databases might grow by a factor 4?
> - Is there documentation how such columns are stored in Oracle?
>
> Thank you,
> Laurenz Albe

In addition to what Sybrand already explained, if you are really stuck on UTF, take UTF16 - it's fixed 2 byte, and closest to what MS uses for the recent Windows products (assuming many applications will have a Windows front end). Meaning every character stored uses 2 bytes of space.

By why bother at all?!? Disks are cheap

-- 
Regards,
Frank van Bortel

Top-posting is one way to shut me up...