Oracle Database Discussions

Oracle 11gR2/ Unix

Hi All,

I was wondering if there is a way to create or alter CHAR and VARCHAR2 columns without specifying the CHAR clause in the following SQL statement?

CREATE TABLE t1 (
id   NUMBER(10),
name   VARCHAR2(20 CHAR));

I know the default is BYTE and it can be changed by setting the NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS parameter to CHAR (as has been mentioned in ML Note: 144808.1), but is there any other way to do this? Should we even change it or just leave it at BYTE and just explicitly specify CHAR each time?

Thanks.