French Language Support & Insertion Errors - need guidance

Question

My organization is currently deploying an in-house app based on an Access frontend that passes on it data to the Oracle ODBC driver for posting in the main Oracle database on a Solaris server. Works like a charm on English based machines but when we attempt a post on a French NT4 Workstation, with French Acces runtime component, it displays an error message (bare with my vague translation of the error message):
ODBC Error in insertion to attached table "table_name".
Along those lines... Does anyone have any French support experience that can guide to a solution? We think it's an NLS issue but it could simply be solved by ODBC settings, such as Translation Options.
Your help in appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

First thing to check is that the client NLS settings and Control Panel | Regional Options agree about what language the client is using. Access relies on the Regional Settings for things like formatting of numbers (1.234 vs. 1,234) while Oracle's ODBC driver relies on the NLS settings.
Assuming that checks out, I'd make sure that the database is set up properly for French data. Assuming that your database is handling Unicode data, remember that a table defined with a varchar2(2000) column has 2000 bytes of data available, not necessarily 2000 characters. In a UTF8 database, I believe that all English characters are 1 byte, while some or all French characters may be multi-byte.
Justin Cave