Database Software

Hello!

After reading oooodles of documentation my efforts amount to upside down ???.

I'm on Oracle 10g and need to have the bulk of the database on WE8MSWIN1252 characterset and need to use the NCHAR and NVARCHAR(2) datatypes for storage of unicode data. Per my research NLS_CHARACTERSET can be WE8MSWIN1252, while the NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET which is utilized by the NCHAR/NVARCHAR datatypes set to either AL16UTF16, AL8UTF16 or UTF8.

The only success I've experienced is when the NLS_CHARACTERSET was also set to UTF8. It was close at:
NLS_CHARACTERSET WE8MSWIN1252
NLS_CHARACTERSET UTF8
but the Japanese characters were changed into boxed and different, albeit Asian in appearance, characters. Also I got inconsistent results when running inserts from SQL scratch pad (using and not N''notation) and view/edit contents.

I have the appropriate language packs/fonts installed so it's not a problem of viewing, it is definetly storage.

I would be grateful to anybody who can shed some light on this stuff.

Here are my settings:
NAME VALUE$
------------------------------ --------------------
DBTIMEZONE -08:00 DEFAULT_PERMANENT_TABLESPACE USERS
DEFAULT_TBS_TYPE SMALLFILE
DEFAULT_TEMP_TABLESPACE TEMP
DICT.BASE 2
EXPORT_VIEWS_VERSION 8
GLOBAL_DB_NAME CRM.LACIE.COM
NLS_CALENDAR GREGORIAN
NLS_CHARACTERSET WE8MSWIN1252
NLS_COMP BINARY
NLS_CURRENCY $
NLS_DATE_FORMAT DD-MON-RR
NLS_DATE_LANGUAGE AMERICAN
NLS_DUAL_CURRENCY $
NLS_ISO_CURRENCY AMERICA
NLS_LANGUAGE AMERICAN
NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS BYTE
NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET AL16UTF16
NLS_NCHAR_CONV_EXCP FALSE
NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS .,
NLS_RDBMS_VERSION 10.1.0.3.0
NLS_SORT BINARY
NLS_TERRITORY AMERICA