Oracle Database Discussions

Hi,

I have a C# application, wherein I need to store long compressed strings (around 500 in length after compression) into an Oracle 10g Database and fetch this string from the database, decompress it and compare it to what the users input to my application. The problem is that it inserts '????????' into the database instead of the actual string. Then when I try to retrieve the string, it gives me these ??????.... .I cannot compare these question marks with the users input. Do I need to change some settings in the OracleDatabase. The application works fine if I use SQL server 2003 instead of Oracle. (Right now I have specified the datatype in Oracle as nvarchar2) I tried to change the collation in Oracle to Default, UTF8, USC2 and Latin but without any success.

My Application is a Web Application (ASP.NET and C#) and I am using the Microsoft ODBC Driver for Oracle.

One more point to note: When I compress the string, it gets converted to Japanese (or Chinese, not sure about the characters) Characters (When I see it on an aspx page). But when I store it in the database, and then check the database I see this huge string of question marks.

After retrieval from the database, I still see the question marks.

Thanks in advance.