The first version of the Unicode Standard was a 16-bit, fixed-width encoding that used two bytes to encode each character. This enabled 65,536 characters to be represented. However, more characters need to be supported, especially additional CJK ideographs that are important for the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean markets.

The current definition of the Unicode Standard assigns a number to each character defined in the standard. These numbers are called code points, and are in the range 0 to 10FFFF hexadecimal. The Unicode notation for representing character code points is the prefix "U+" followed by the hexadecimal code point value. The code point value is left-padded with non-significant zeros to the minimum length of four. Characters with code points U+0000 to U+FFFF are called Basic Multilingual Plane characters. Characters with code points U+10000 to U+10FFFF are called supplementary characters.

Adding supplementary characters has increased the complexity of the Unicode 16-bit, fixed-width encoding form; however, this is still far less complex than managing hundreds of legacy encodings used before Unicode.

The Unicode Standard defines a few encoding forms, which are mappings from Unicode code points to code units. Code units are integer values processed by applications. Code units may have 8, 16, or 32 bits. The standard encoding forms are: UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. There are also two compatibility encodings mentioned in the standard and its associated technical reports: UCS-2 and CESU-8. Conversion between different Unicode encodings is a simple bit-wise operation that is defined in the standard.

This section contains the following topics:

• UTF-8 Encoding Form

• UTF-16 Encoding Form

• UCS-2 Encoding Form

• UTF-32 Encoding Form

• CESU-8 Encoding Form

• Examples: UTF-16, UTF-8, and UCS-2 Encoding

Oracle Database began supporting the Unicode character set as a database character set in release 7. Table 6-1 summarizes the Unicode character sets supported by Oracle Database.

^Footnote 1 UTF-EBCDIC is a compatibility encoding form specific to EBCDIC-based systems, such as IBM z/OS or Fujitsu BS2000. It is described in the Unicode Technical Report #16. Oracle character set UTFE is a partial implementation of the UTF-EBCDIC encoding form, supported on ECBDIC-based platforms only. Oracle Database does not support five-byte sequences of the this encoding form, limiting the supported code point range to U+000 - U+3FFFF. The use of the UTFE character set is discouraged.

The database character set specifies the encoding to be used in the SQL CHAR data types as well as the metadata such as table names, column names, and SQL statements. A Unicode Standard-enabled database is a database with a Unicode Standard-compliant character set as the database character set. There are two database Oracle character sets that implement the Unicode Standard.

• AL32UTF8

  The AL32UTF8 character set implements the UTF-8 encoding form and supports the latest version of the Unicode standard. It encodes characters in one, two, three, or four bytes. Supplementary characters require four bytes. It is for ASCII-based platforms.

  AL32UTF8 is the recommended database character set for any new deployment of Oracle Database as it provides the optimal support for multilingual applications, such as Internet websites and applications for multinational companies.

• UTF8

  The UTF8 character set implements the CESU-8 encoding form and encodes characters in one, two, or three bytes. It is for ASCII-based platforms.

  Supplementary characters inserted into a UTF8 database are stored in the CESU-8 encoding form. Each character is represented by two three-byte codes and hence occupies six bytes of memory in total.

  The properties of characters in the UTF8 character set are not guaranteed to be updated beyond version 3.0 of the Unicode Standard.

  Oracle recommends that you switch to AL32UTF8 for full support of the supplementary characters and the most recent versions of the Unicode Standard.

CREATE DATABASE sample 

CONTROLFILE REUSE 
LOGFILE 

GROUP 1 ('diskx:log1.log', 'disky:log1.log') SIZE 50K, 
GROUP 2 ('diskx:log2.log', 'disky:log2.log') SIZE 50K 

MAXLOGFILES 5 
MAXLOGHISTORY 100 
MAXDATAFILES 10 
MAXINSTANCES 2 
ARCHIVELOG
CHARACTER SET AL32UTF8
NATIONAL CHARACTER SET AL16UTF16 
DATAFILE 

'disk1:df1.dbf' AUTOEXTEND ON, 
'disk2:df2.dbf' AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 10M MAXSIZE UNLIMITED 

DEFAULT TEMPORARY TABLESPACE temp_ts 
UNDO TABLESPACE undo_ts 
SET TIME_ZONE = '+00:00';

An alternative to storing Unicode data in the database is to use the SQL NCHAR data types (NCHAR, NVARCHAR2, NCLOB). You can store Unicode characters in columns of these data types regardless of how the database character set has been defined. The NCHAR data type is exclusively a Unicode data type, which means that it stores data encoded in a Unicode encoding form.

Oracle recommends using SQL CHAR, VARCHAR2, and CLOB data types in AL32UTF8 database to store Unicode character data. SQL NCHAR, NVARCHAR2, and NCLOB data types are not supported by some database features. Most notably, Oracle Text and XML DB do not support these data types.

You can create a table using the NVARCHAR2 and NCHAR data types. The column length specified for the NCHAR and NVARCHAR2 columns always equals the number of characters instead of the number of bytes:

CREATE TABLE product_information 
    ( product_id          NUMBER(6) 
    , product_name        NVARCHAR2(100) 
    , product_description VARCHAR2(1000));

The encoding used in the SQL NCHAR data types is the national character set specified for the database. You can specify one of the following Oracle character sets as the national character set:

• AL16UTF16

  This is the default character set and recommended for SQL NCHAR data types. This character set encodes Unicode data in the UTF-16 encoding form. It supports supplementary characters, which are stored as four bytes.

• UTF8

  When UTF8 is specified for SQL NCHAR data types, the data stored in the SQL data types is in CESU-8 encoding form. The UTF8 character set is deprecated.

You can specify the national character set for the SQL NCHAR data types when you create a database using the CREATE DATABASE statement with the NATIONAL CHARACTER SET clause. The following statement creates a database with WE8ISO8859P1 as the database character set and AL16UTF16 as the national character set.

CREATE DATABASE sample 

CONTROLFILE REUSE 
LOGFILE 

GROUP 1 ('diskx:log1.log', 'disky:log1.log') SIZE 50K, 
GROUP 2 ('diskx:log2.log', 'disky:log2.log') SIZE 50K 

MAXLOGFILES 5 
MAXLOGHISTORY 100 
MAXDATAFILES 10 
MAXINSTANCES 2 
ARCHIVELOG
CHARACTER SET WE8ISO8859P1
NATIONAL CHARACTER SET AL16UTF16 
DATAFILE 

'disk1:df1.dbf' AUTOEXTEND ON, 
'disk2:df2.dbf' AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 10M MAXSIZE UNLIMITED 

DEFAULT TEMPORARY TABLESPACE temp_ts 
UNDO TABLESPACE undo_ts 
SET TIME_ZONE = '+00:00';

Oracle recommends that you deploy all new Oracle databases in the database character set AL32UTF8 and you use SQL VARCHAR2, CHAR, and CLOB data types to store character data. The SQL NVARCHAR2, NCHAR, and NCLOB data types should be considered only if:

• You have an existing database with a non-Unicode database character set and a legacy application, for which the business costs of migrating to Unicode would be inacceptable, and you need to add support for multilingual data in a small part of the application or in a small new module for which a separate database would not make much sense, or

• You need to create an application that has to support multilingual data and which must be installable in any of Oracle database deployed by your customers.

For the database character set in a Unicode Standard-enabled database, always select AL32UTF8. For the national character set, select AL16UTF16. If you consider choosing the deprecated UTF8 because of the lower storage requirements for English character data, first consider other options, such as data compression or increasing disk storage. Later migration to AL16UTF16 may be expensive, if a lot of data accumulates in the database.

When you use NCHAR and NVARCHAR2 data types for storing multilingual data, the column size specified for a column is defined in number of characters. (This number of characters means the number of encoded Unicode code points, except that supplementary Unicode characters represented through surrogate pairs count as two characters.)

The following table shows the maximum size of the NCHAR and NVARCHAR2 data types for the AL16UTF16 and UTF8 national character sets.

This maximum size in characters is a constraint, not guaranteed capacity of the data type. The maximum capacity is expressed in bytes.

For the NCHAR data type, the maximum capacity is 2000 bytes. For NVARCHAR2, it is 4000 bytes, if the initialization parameter MAX_STRING_SIZE is set to STANDARD, and 32767 bytes, if the initialization parameter MAX_STRING_SIZE is set to EXTENDED

When the national character set is AL16UTF16, the maximum number of characters never occupies more bytes than the maximum capacity, as each character (in an Oracle sense) occupies exactly 2 bytes. However, if the national character set is UTF8, the maximum number of characters can be stored only if all these characters are from the Unicode Basic Latin range, which corresponds to the ASCII standard.

Other Unicode characters occupy more than one byte each in UTF8 and presence of such characters in a 4000 character string makes the string longer than the maximum 4000 bytes. If you want national character set columns to be able to hold the declared number of characters in any national character set, do not declare NCHAR columns longer than 2000/3=666 characters and NVARCHAR2 columns longer than 4000/3=1333 or 32767/3=10922 characters, depending on the MAX_STRING_SIZE initialization parameter.

When you use CHAR and VARCHAR2 data types for storing multilingual data, the maximum length specified for each column is, by default, in number of bytes. If the database needs to support Thai, Arabic, or multibyte languages such as Chinese and Japanese, then the maximum lengths of the CHAR, VARCHAR, and VARCHAR2 columns may need to be extended. This is because the number of bytes required to encode these languages in UTF8 or AL32UTF8 may be significantly larger than the number of bytes for encoding English and Western European languages. For example, one Thai character in the Thai character set requires 3 bytes in UTF8 or AL32UTF8. Application designers should consider using an extended character data type or CLOB data type if they need to store data larger than 4000 bytes.

The Unicode character set includes characters of most written languages around the world, but it does not contain information about the language to which a given character belongs. In other words, a character such as ä does not contain information about whether it is a Swedish or German character. In order to provide information in the language a user desires, data stored in a Unicode database should be tagged with the language information to which the data belongs.

There are many ways for a database schema to relate data to a language. The following sections discuss example steps to achieve this goal.

ALTER TABLE scott.product_information ADD (language_id VARCHAR2(50)):

CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW product AS 
   SELECT product_id, product_name 
   FROM   product_information 
   WHERE  language_id = SYS_CONTEXT('USERENV','LANG');

WHERE language_id = SYS_CONTEXT('userenv', 'LANG')

CREATE FUNCTION func1 (sch VARCHAR2 , obj VARCHAR2 )
RETURN VARCHAR2(100);
BEGIN
RETURN 'language_id = SYS_CONTEXT(''userenv'', ''LANG'')';
END
/

DBMS_RLS.ADD_POLICY ('scott', 'product_information', 'lang_policy', 'scott', 'func1', 'select');

You can store documents in multiple languages in CLOB, NCLOB, or BLOB data types and set up Oracle Text to enable content search for the documents.

Data in CLOB columns is stored in the AL16UTF16 character set when the database character set is multibyte, such as UTF8 or AL32UTF8. This means that the storage space required for an English document doubles when the data is converted. Storage for an Asian language document in a CLOB column requires less storage space than the same document in a LONG column using AL32UTF8, typically around 30% less, depending on the contents of the document.

Documents in NCLOB format are also stored in the AL16UTF16 character set regardless of the database character set or national character set. The storage space requirement is the same as for CLOB data. Document contents are converted to UTF-16 when they are inserted into a NCLOB column. If you want to store multilingual documents in a non-Unicode database, then choose NCLOB. However, content search on NCLOB with Oracle Text is not supported.

Documents in BLOB format are stored as they are. No data conversion occurs during insertion and retrieval. However, SQL string manipulation functions (such as LENGTH or SUBSTR) and collation functions (such as NLS_SORT and ORDER BY) cannot be applied to the BLOB data type.

The following table lists the advantages and disadvantages of the CLOB, NCLOB, and BLOB data types when storing documents:

Oracle Text enables you to build indexes for content search on multilingual documents stored in CLOB format and BLOB format. It uses a language-specific lexer to parse the CLOB or BLOB data and produces a list of searchable keywords.

Create a multilexer to search multilingual documents. The multilexer chooses a language-specific lexer for each row, based on a language column. This section describes the high level steps to create indexes for documents in multiple languages. It contains the following topics:

• Creating Multilexers

• Creating Indexes for Documents Stored in the CLOB Data Type

• Creating Indexes for Documents Stored in the BLOB Data Type

  See Also:

  Oracle Text Reference