Database Software

Hi,

Here are the following character sets of our DB:

PARAMETER VALUE
------------------------- -------------------------
NLS_CHARACTERSET US7ASCII
NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET UTF8

On my client I'm using NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.US7ASCII.

I understand that NLS_CHARACTERSET is for CHAR, VARCHAR2, CLOB, LONG columns. NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET is for storing data in NCHAR, NVARCHAR2, NCLOB columns.

One of our tables, TABLE_A, has fields:

- PK NUMBER(12)
- FIELD_A VARCHAR2(200)

I tried to insert accented characters (glyph) into the table; eg, é. Afterwards, I used SQL Plus to query the table, the accented character é shows up correctly. I thought if my table column is defined as VARCHAR2, Oracle uses US7ASCII character set (7-bit, and does not include accented characters? Does Oracle automatically use NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET (UTF8) if NLS_CHARACTERSET (US7ASCII) cannot handle the accented characters I insert?

Thank you very much.