Globalization (UTF 8 or UTF 16)
We are in the process of developing application to support CJK and Western
European languages.
We use AL32UTF8 as character set and AL16UTF16 for National character set.
We are developing application and using UTF-16 Unicode( OCI wide API) because of
faster string processing capability.
1.Is it good approach to change every CHAR and VARCHAR2 columns in the database
to NCHAR and NVARCHAR2 to avoid character set conversation from UTF 8 to UTF16.
2. Is conversation from UTF-8 to UTF-16 considerable overhead?
3.We have more Western European characters (85%) and few Asian characters; I am
guessing that if we convert every VARCHAR to NVARCHAR2 we may almost double the
database size and requires to double SGA size for same performance before
conversion. Could you advise if this is reasonable guess?
4.Our application team using UTF-16 for faster string processing (over UTF8
variable width) but database uses UTF-8 not UTF-16 for CHAR type, Is is good
approch to develop application to use UTF-8 instead of UTF-16 ?
Thank you,
V