RDS for Oracle character sets (original) (raw)
RDS for Oracle supports two types of character sets: the DB character set and national character set.
DB character set
The Oracle database character set is used in the CHAR, VARCHAR2, and CLOB data types. The database also uses this character set for metadata such as table names, column names, and SQL statements. The Oracle database character set is typically referred to as the DB character set.
You set the character set when you create a DB instance. You can't change the DB character set after you create the database.
Supported DB character sets
The following table lists the Oracle DB character sets that are supported in Amazon RDS. You can use a value from this table with the --character-set-name parameter of the AWS CLI create-db-instance command or with theCharacterSetName parameter of the Amazon RDS API CreateDBInstance operation.
Note
The character set for a CDB is always AL32UTF8. You can set a different character set for the PDB only.
| Value | Description |
|---|---|
| AL32UTF8 | Unicode 5.0 UTF-8 Universal character set (default) |
| AR8ISO8859P6 | ISO 8859-6 Latin/Arabic |
| AR8MSWIN1256 | Microsoft Windows Code Page 1256 8-bit Latin/Arabic |
| BLT8ISO8859P13 | ISO 8859-13 Baltic |
| BLT8MSWIN1257 | Microsoft Windows Code Page 1257 8-bit Baltic |
| CL8ISO8859P5 | ISO 88559-5 Latin/Cyrillic |
| CL8MSWIN1251 | Microsoft Windows Code Page 1251 8-bit Latin/Cyrillic |
| EE8ISO8859P2 | ISO 8859-2 East European |
| EL8ISO8859P7 | ISO 8859-7 Latin/Greek |
| EE8MSWIN1250 | Microsoft Windows Code Page 1250 8-bit East European |
| EL8MSWIN1253 | Microsoft Windows Code Page 1253 8-bit Latin/Greek |
| IW8ISO8859P8 | ISO 8859-8 Latin/Hebrew |
| IW8MSWIN1255 | Microsoft Windows Code Page 1255 8-bit Latin/Hebrew |
| JA16EUC | EUC 24-bit Japanese |
| JA16EUCTILDE | Same as JA16EUC except for mapping of wave dash and tilde to and from Unicode |
| JA16SJIS | Shift-JIS 16-bit Japanese |
| JA16SJISTILDE | Same as JA16SJIS except for mapping of wave dash and tilde to and from Unicode |
| KO16MSWIN949 | Microsoft Windows Code Page 949 Korean |
| NE8ISO8859P10 | ISO 8859-10 North European |
| NEE8ISO8859P4 | ISO 8859-4 North and Northeast European |
| TH8TISASCII | Thai Industrial Standard 620-2533-ASCII 8-bit |
| TR8MSWIN1254 | Microsoft Windows Code Page 1254 8-bit Turkish |
| US7ASCII | ASCII 7-bit American |
| UTF8 | Unicode 3.0 UTF-8 Universal character set, CESU-8 compliant |
| VN8MSWIN1258 | Microsoft Windows Code Page 1258 8-bit Vietnamese |
| WE8ISO8859P1 | Western European 8-bit ISO 8859 Part 1 |
| WE8ISO8859P15 | ISO 8859-15 West European |
| WE8ISO8859P9 | ISO 8859-9 West European and Turkish |
| WE8MSWIN1252 | Microsoft Windows Code Page 1252 8-bit West European |
| ZHS16GBK | GBK 16-bit Simplified Chinese |
| ZHT16HKSCS | Microsoft Windows Code Page 950 with Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set HKSCS-2001. Character set conversion is based on Unicode 3.0. |
| ZHT16MSWIN950 | Microsoft Windows Code Page 950 Traditional Chinese |
| ZHT32EUC | EUC 32-bit Traditional Chinese |
NLS_LANG environment variable
A locale is a set of information addressing linguistic and cultural requirements that corresponds to a given language and country. Setting the NLS_LANG environment variable in your client's environment is the simplest way to specify locale behavior for Oracle. This variable sets the language and territory used by the client application and the database server. It also indicates the client's character set, which corresponds to the character set for data entered or displayed by a client application. For more information on NLS_LANG and character sets, see What is a character set or code page? in the Oracle documentation.
NLS initialization parameters
You can also set the following National Language Support (NLS) initialization parameters at the instance level for an Oracle DB instance in Amazon RDS:
- NLS_DATE_FORMAT
- NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS
- NLS_NCHAR_CONV_EXCP
- NLS_TIME_FORMAT
- NLS_TIME_TZ_FORMAT
- NLS_TIMESTAMP_FORMAT
- NLS_TIMESTAMP_TZ_FORMAT
For information about modifying instance parameters, see Parameter groups for Amazon RDS.
You can set other NLS initialization parameters in your SQL client. For example, the following statement sets the NLS_LANGUAGE initialization parameter to GERMAN in a SQL client that is connected to an Oracle DB instance:
ALTER SESSION SET NLS_LANGUAGE=GERMAN;For information about connecting to an Oracle DB instance with a SQL client, see Connecting to your Oracle DB instance.
National character set
The national character set is used in the NCHAR, NVARCHAR2, andNCLOB data types. The national character set is typically referred to as the NCHAR character set. Unlike the DB character set, the NCHAR character set doesn't affect database metadata.
The NCHAR character set supports the following character sets:
- AL16UTF16 (default)
- UTF8
You can specify either value with the --nchar-character-set-name parameter of the create-db-instance command (AWS CLI version 2 only). If you use the Amazon RDS API, specify theNcharCharacterSetName parameter of CreateDBInstance operation. You can't change the national character set after you create the database.
For more information about Unicode in Oracle databases, see Supporting multilingual databases with unicode in the Oracle documentation.