Home/ Questions/Q 3879062
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-19T22:41:00+00:00

I’m trying to figure out where our project went wrong. A long time ago,

  • 0

I’m trying to figure out where our project went wrong.

A long time ago, our database administrator created a user and a schema for the project we were working on.

We gave that user to a contractor who created the tables and installed the application.

Today I discovered that our database doesn’t support UTF-8 characters and we need it to.

select value from nls_database_parameters 
where parameter='NLS_CHARACTERSET'

The result is : WE8ISO8859P1

My question is, was the mistake made when the user was created, or was the mistake done by the contractor who created the tables?

Thanks

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The character set is an attribute of the database. So whoever created the database presumably chose the wrong character set. There are no character set related settings when you create a user or create a table (other than determining whether to use the database character set (CHAR/ VARCHAR2) or the national character set (NCHAR/ NVARCHAR2) data types).

    Changing the character set of an existing database may take a bit of effort. The Globalization Guide has a section on character set migration. Depending on the Oracle version (the procedure is different in 10g and 11g) and what data already exists, doing an export & import to a new database may be the easiest option.

    I should add that the order of operations you specified in your post doesn’t make sense. The database has to be created before the user or the schema can be created. So it doesn’t make sense that the DBA could have created the user and the schema a long time ago and the contractor created the database more recently. Are you possibly using the terms “database” and “schema” in a non-Oracle context?

    • 0