Oracle support for multiple languages

Question

I have a VB and oracle application. There is a requirement for having spanish language support.
The current character set is US7ASCII and National Character set is AL16UTF16.
After some analysis i thought changing these character sets to UTF8 will be a solution for saving spanish characters.
Can any please help me whether this is correct?
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

That's true.
However since you are moving from single-byte character set to multi-bytes, you should be aware of the data truncation problem. that's the dangerous I was talking about.
Data Truncation
When the database is created using byte semantics, the sizes of the CHAR and VARCHAR2 datatypes are specified in bytes, not characters. For example, the specification CHAR(20) in a table definition allows 20 bytes for storing character data. This is acceptable when the database character set uses a single-byte character encoding scheme because the number of characters is equivalent to the number of bytes. If the database character set uses a multibyte character encoding scheme, then the number of bytes no longer equals the number of characters because a character can consist of one or more bytes.
During migration to a new character set, it is important to verify the column widths of existing CHAR and VARCHAR2 columns because they might need to be extended to support an encoding that requires multibyte storage. Truncation of data can occur if conversion causes expansion of data.