Oracle 8.1.7.4 + JDBC Driver 10.2.0.3.0=invalid or unknown NLS parameter...

Question

I'm having an issue trying to update the jdbc driver from 10.1.0.2.0 to 10.2.0.3.0 to access an Oracle 8.1.7.4 instance. Using this code I'm getting the following exception, any ideas how to fix it?
Thanks,
Johann
Connection c = null;
try {
     Driver dr = new oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver();
     DriverManager.registerDriver(dr);
     Properties props = new Properties();
     props.put("user", "congiromsr");
     props.put("password", "the password");
     String url = "jdbc:oracle:thin:@cholguaco:1533:lobo";
     c = dr.connect(url, props);
     System.out.println("The driver is "
               + c.getMetaData().getDriverVersion());
     System.out.println("The DBMS is "
               + c.getMetaData().getDatabaseProductVersion());
} catch (Exception e) {
     e.printStackTrace();
} finally {
     try {
          c.close();
     } catch (Exception ignore) {
java.sql.SQLException: ORA-00604: error occurred at recursive SQL level 1
ORA-12705: invalid or unknown NLS parameter value specified
     at oracle.jdbc.driver.DatabaseError.throwSqlException(DatabaseError.java:112)
     at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CTTIoer.processError(T4CTTIoer.java:331)
     at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CTTIoer.processError(T4CTTIoer.java:283)
     at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CTTIoer.processError(T4CTTIoer.java:278)
     at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CTTIoauthenticate.receiveOauth(T4CTTIoauthenticate.java:791)
     at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CConnection.logon(T4CConnection.java:362)
     at oracle.jdbc.driver.PhysicalConnection.<init>(PhysicalConnection.java:439)
     at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CConnection.<init>(T4CConnection.java:165)
     at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CDriverExtension.getConnection(T4CDriverExtension.java:35)
     at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver.connect(OracleDriver.java:801)
     at TestClass.main(TestClass.java:14)

Answer 1

JDBC drivers set NLS parameters based on your locale settings. There are three based parameters: language, territory and character set. Maybe in your case JDBC driver 10.2.0.3.0 sets one of them with value that is not supported in Oracle Database 8.1.7.4. Character set is the first candidate for this. JDBC drivers use only Unicode character sets - there are a few new of them in Oracle Database 10g. 8 and 9 versions of JDBC drivers use UTF8 which is Unicode version 3.0 but in 10g is added Al32UTF8 which is Unicode version 4.0.