Character Set questions on setup
567263Jul 9 2007 — edited Jul 26 2007I am trying to determine what the best setup recommendations are for creating non_English Oracle 10g databases. I have not had much experience building databases for non_English locales, so this is getting a little overwhelming as I have been researching Oracle's Database Globalization Support Guide. Obviously it has a wealth of information and I am trying to determine what applies to us at this point and time.
Generally when someone buys our product they create a new Oracle instance for our app. I need to be able to recommend proper database settings/parameters for potential global customers who purchase our software to run on Oracle.
Currently my biggest question is what to recommend for the Database Characterset on db creation. Currently the DB Character Set we recommend (for standard U.S. installs on Windows) is the default WE8MSWIN1252 character set. Our application is non-unicode. It has been recommended to me from an outside consultant that we "must" use UTF-8 for DB and National Character Set settings, as opposed to WE8MSWIN1252 or WE8ISO8859P1. I should mention that our focus at this point and time is getting a solution for French, German, and Spanish. We are also more concerned about a single language setup than multilanguage - although that is a definite future consideration.
What impact can using UTF-8 as opposed to WE8MSWIN1252 or WE8ISO8859P1 have on a non-unicode application? I hope I am explaining the situation well enough as I am fairly new and still getting to know our application. I am kind of getting thrown into the i18n fire...
Any input is greatly appreciated. Thanks.