How to know whether my oracle 10g instalation in unicode supported or not

Question

Hi
i am new to oracle. I have installed Oracle 10g client and server.
I want to know whether the database created can store unicode data/arabic data.
Please guide me how can i find whether unicode support is on for my db or not.
The outputs of some of the queries run by me are as follows:
SQL> HOST ECHO $NLS_LANG;
$NLS_LANG
SQL> HOST ECHO %NLS_LANG%;
%NLS_LANG%
SQL> @.[%NLS_LANG%];
SP2-0310: unable to open file ".[AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8MSWIN1252]"
SQL> select cust_eng_name,cust_arb_name from custmast;
select cust_eng_name,cust_arb_name from custmast
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00942: table or view does not exist
Please reply me asap.

Answer 1

user10817093 wrote:
1. Yeh that is the thing I want. What are the other steps that i need to do with my Oracle Client/Server for unicode support.
Where i am getting trouble is the Oracle Client/Server unicode support.
And how to decide what character set will suite me best.1. If your application is going to be a "true" Unicode application, you can set the NLS_LANG registry/environment setting on your clients to ".UTF8" to enable true Unicode support.
2. Your database needs to support Unicode, too.
The recommended database character set for this in 10g is "AL32UTF8".
If you currently have a single-byte database character set (WE8MSWIN1252), you need to decide how to get this done.
If you can simply create a new database using the "AL32UTF8" character set, this would be the easiest way.
There are several documents available (e.g. on Oracle MetaLink) that describe in detail how to convert the character set of an existing database. Depending on your data this can be a tedious task involving several steps, so may be creating a new database and exporting/importing the data might be the simplest choice if you need to migrate some existing data.
The recommended national character set is "AL16UTF16", by the way, but that shouldn't matter that much once you have a Unicode enabled database using "AL32UTF8" as database character set.
2. How to set/retrive the "Database Character Set" and "National Character Set". This has already been answered partly. Retrieve:
Database Character Set:
SELECT VALUE FROM NLS_DATABASE_PARAMETERS WHERE PARAMETER = 'NLS_CHARACTERSET';National Character Set:
SELECT VALUE FROM NLS_DATABASE_PARAMETERS WHERE PARAMETER = 'NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET';In most of the cases you can't just simply set/alter the character sets, as outlined above.
Regards,
Randolf
Oracle related stuff blog:
http://oracle-randolf.blogspot.com/
SQLTools++ for Oracle (Open source Oracle GUI for Windows):
http://www.sqltools-plusplus.org:7676/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlt-pp/