Unicode Character Allocation

From: my_grillz_gleam <socrates73_at_yahoo.com>
Date: 13 Apr 2006 11:56:03 -0700
Message-ID: <1144954563.771403.246200@e56g2000cwe.googlegroups.com>

Hello all,

I have a quick question regarding how Oracle allocates storage space for its data types. In particular, I have been tasked develop processes to move data between Oracle and DB2 databases which both are set to use UTF-8. Now, I have no problems moving data from the DB2 tables to the Oracle tables, however moving from Oracle to DB2 has been causing records to reject. And to note, both tables have the exact same DDL and the Oracle is using BYTE semantics (DB2 only has BYTE semantics). Now my question is:

Does Oracle, in UTF-8 mode, actually allocate 4 bytes per every byte specified in the DDL for a character field?

i.e. does VARCHAR2(100 BYTE) equal 400 bytes or 100 bytes of disk space allocated? It seems to me that this is the case, from my testing. And unfortunately my Oracle DBA was not able to confirm this. Received on Thu Apr 13 2006 - 13:56:03 CDT