Database Software

DB: Oracle 9.2.0.1.0 on Linux
Client: 9.2.0.1.0 on Windows 2000/XP, Bulgarian regional options

Hi,

I have big trouble using CL8MSWIN1251 as a client charset, WE8ISO8859P1 as a database charset and AL16UTF16 as a national charset. I do this cause I want to make only few datas multilingual, using NCHAR datatypes. Furthermore, I chose AL16UTF16 because in some oracle docs I've read this type is most compatible with windows clients because it's fixed length and a strict superset of UCS-2.

1) It seems to me that SQL*Net converts all cyrillic characters to ? or whatever (but identical anyway) on the modification phase. Then on the fetch phase I get all ? for cyrillic.

2) When I set the client charset to WE8ISO8859P1, everything works fine, BUT I think it's not a clever idea, cause it could impose some implications in the future.

3) When I insert/update using WE8ISO8859P1 and fetch using CL8MSWIN1251, I get just incorrect characters, because of the recoding between these both.

All this makes me to think there is some bug with CL8MSWIN1251. Can someone help me?

One more question: When I set client charset to AL16UTF16, on db login the oracle client does not complain about "invalid NLS parameter" (though it's not a valid client setting), but these: OEM 2.2 shows "Connection closed", dbExpress in Borland Delphi 7 raises an exception "Mapping failed", etc. UTF8 setting for the client works, but why to recode between them, if I decide to make it the hard way and work with raw UTF16 in Delphi. For what reason the AL16UTF16 is not a valid client charset, but not treated as such?

Please, throw some light on these, especially on the first question.

With best regards,
Anton Kolev