Environment Character Set Configuration

By default, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) under which a Replication Agent instance is running finds your system default character set. The type of character data that Replication Agent can handle is determined by the character set, also known as the encoding. Unless you want to override the default character set that the JVM finds on your system, you do not need to explicitly set the character set-related environment variable.

To support overriding the default character set, all of the executable scripts (or batch files) in the Replication Agent /bin directory refer to an environment variable named RA_JAVA_DFLT_CHARSET. You can set this environment variable to use the character set you want. The character set you specify must be the character set configured on the primary database. For a list of valid Java 7 character sets, see the supported encodings on the internationalization page at http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/intl/encoding.doc.html

All Replication Agent instance RUN scripts also reference the RA_JAVA_DFLT_CHARSET environment variable.

Note: If you are using Replication Server to replicate a number of different character sets, you must configure it for UTF8.

You can override the system default character set by either:

Set the value of a system variable named RA_JAVA_DFLT_CHARSET in your environment and use ra to start the Replication Agent instance, or,
Set the value of the RA_JAVA_DFLT_CHARSET variable in the Replication Agent instance RUN script and use the RUN script to start the Replication Agent instance.

If you start a Replication Agent instance by invoking ra, you can override the value of the RA_JAVA_DFLT_CHARSET system variable in your environment to specify the character set.

If you start a Replication Agent instance by invoking the instance RUN script (or batch file), you can edit the instance RUN script to specify the default value of RA_JAVA_DFLT_CHARSET and specify the character set you want to use.