Could u please help me regarding the datatype nvarchar

Uday Kumar

Basically oracle supports two types of character sets
1) database character set
2) national character set(nchar,nvarchar)

Database character set- supports on byte ASCII,EBCDIC adequate to support roman alphabet but some asian langauges like japanes,chinese contain thousands of characters.To deal with such languages, Oracle provides globalization support, which lets you process single-byte and multibyte character data and convert between character sets. It also lets your applications run in different language environments.

The national character set represents data as Unicode, using either the UTF8 or AL16UTF16 encoding.
Each character in the AL16UTF16 encoding takes up 2 bytes
Each character in the UTF8 encoding takes up 1, 2, or 3 bytes

The diff between varchar and nvarchar is varchar - specifies size in bytes/characters eg s1 varchar2(50) --maximum size in bytes.

nvarchar - specifies size in charaters eg s1 NVARCHAR2(50)-- maximum size is 50 characters

Kiran
 

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