Oracle 9i Support for multi language is not working.. Giving question mark

Question

HI,
We have an application which uses oracle 9i as the database. Riight now we are supporting only english and there is a requirement to support multiple languages like korean, chineese and japaneese.
But we are planning to migrate one part of the application to support multi languages. Means it may affect around 10 tables but with huge data. Totally we have around 100 tables.
How to enable the database for supporting multiple langugages.?
Is there any way to enable only the few tables supporting multiple languages. Because if we change the database level parameters for supporting languages, we may need to migrate entire tables. this will be a huge task.
Even if want to set the parameters for supporting multiple languages.. how to set it. Is it possible set it in the existing database or do we need to re-create the table with these prameters.
I have read in some documentation, that we can create table columns with nVarchar2 for supporting multi languages. I have created it. but if i copy some other language characters into those columns, it is giving question mark.
Is it possible to do search using text in native langugage like chineese..
Could somebody guide me on the above clarificationa and what would be the best approach..
Thanks in advance
Jino
Regards,
Jino George
Ext: 6520

Answer 1

You should not use any more Oracle 9.0.1 but at least Oracle 9.2.0.8 to get some extended support if you really cannot upgrade to 10g.
I don't have any Oracle 9.x database available but I've run successfully following test with Oracle 10.2.0.1 in character mode under Linux:
oracle@pbell:~$ export NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.AL32UTF8
oracle@pbell:~$ sqlplus / @nls
SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Fri Aug 29 17:29:56 2008
Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options
SQL> drop table t;
Table dropped.
SQL> select * from v$nls_parameters where parameter like '%SET%';
PARAMETER
VALUE
NLS_CHARACTERSET
WE8ISO8859P1
NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET
AL16UTF16
SQL> create table t ( data nvarchar2(100));
Table created.
SQL> insert into t values(unistr('\76EE\7684\5730'));
1 row created.
SQL> select * from t;
DATA
目的地Try to make sure you have the right NLS_LANG setting on the client side (under Windows this is a registry setting).