Specifies whether the NChar literal replacement feature in the Oracle client is enabled. This feature replaces string literals on the client that are prefaced with the letter N with an internal format. The internal format is decoded to Unicode by the database server when the statement is executed.
When to specify NCharLiteral
You must specify the NCharLiteral parameter before connecting
to the database.
O10 Oracle 10g
ORA Oracle 11g
NCharLiteral=value
NCharLiteral='No'
The NCharLiteral database parameter requires Oracle 10.2 or higher on both the client and the database server.
By default, in a SQL statement, the text of any literal is encoded in the same character set as the rest of the statement. The character set on the client is determined by the client character set defined in NLS_LANG. When the statement is executed, the character set on the client is converted to the character set on the database server.
Data in string literals is lost in the conversion if the character set on the database server does not contain the characters used on the client. NChar string literals are most affected by this issue because they are designed to be independent of the character set on the database server.
To avoid this data loss, add the letter N before string literals that should be replaced with an internal format and set the NCharLiteral database parameter to ‘Yes’. This setting causes the Oracle client to encode all literals prefixed with N in statements on the client with an internal format. The database server decodes the literals to Unicode when the statement is executed.
For example, when NCharLiteral is set to “Yes”, the string “some unicode data” in the following SQL statement is transferred from the client to the server with no data loss:
insert into table1 (id, ncharcol) values(1, N'some unicode data')
Setting NCharLiteral to ‘Yes’ has no effect on DataWindow functions.
To specify that string literals prefixed by the letter N should be replaced with an internal format on the client:
Database profile Select the NChar Literal box on the Connection page in the Database Profile Setup dialog box.
Application Type the following in code:
SQLCA.DBParm="NCharLiteral=1"
