About Selecting a Character Set

It is important to select the right character set for your database. Oracle recommends AL32UTF8 as the database character set.

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AL32UTF8 is Oracle’s name for the UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode standard. The Unicode standard is the universal character set that supports most of the currently spoken languages of the world. The use of the Unicode standard is indispensable for any multilingual technology, including database processing.

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After a database is created and accumulates production data, changing the database character set is a time consuming and complex project. Therefore, it is very important to select the right character set at installation time. Even if the database does not currently store multilingual data but is expected to store multilingual data within a few years, the choice of AL32UTF8 for the database character set is usually the only good decision. The universality and flexibility of Unicode typically outweighs some additional cost associated with it, such as slightly slower text processing compared to single-byte character sets and higher storage space requirements for non-ASCII text compared to non-Unicode character sets.

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If you do not want to use AL32UTF8, and you are not restricted in your choice by a vendor requirement, then Oracle suggests that you use one of the character sets listed as recommended for the database. The recommended character sets were selected based on the requirements of modern client operating systems. Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) presents the recommended list only, and Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) must be used separately to choose a non-recommended character set. In addition, the default database creation configuration in DBCA allows the selection of the recommended character sets only. You must use the advanced configuration mode of DBCA or the CREATE DATABASE statement to select a non-recommended character set.

If no character set choice is presented in an OUI or a DBCA installation mode, then AL32UTF8 is used as the database character set, unless a custom database template with another character set has been selected.

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