RDS for Oracle character sets - Amazon Relational Database Service
DB character setNational character set
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RDS for Oracle character sets

RDS for Oracle supports two types of character sets: the DB character set and national character set.

DB character set

The Oracle database character set is used in the CHAR, VARCHAR2, and CLOB data types. The database also uses this character set for metadata such as table names, column names, and SQL statements. The Oracle database character set is typically referred to as the DB character set.

You set the character set when you create a DB instance. You can't change the DB character set after you create the database.

Supported DB character sets

The following table lists the Oracle DB character sets that are supported in Amazon RDS. You can use a value from this table with the --character-set-name parameter of the Amazon CLI create-db-instance command or with the CharacterSetName parameter of the Amazon RDS API CreateDBInstance operation.

Note

The character set for a CDB is always AL32UTF8. You can set a different character set for the PDB only.

Value Description

AL32UTF8

Unicode 5.0 UTF-8 Universal character set (default)

AR8ISO8859P6

ISO 8859-6 Latin/Arabic

AR8MSWIN1256

Microsoft Windows Code Page 1256 8-bit Latin/Arabic

BLT8ISO8859P13

ISO 8859-13 Baltic

BLT8MSWIN1257

Microsoft Windows Code Page 1257 8-bit Baltic

CL8ISO8859P5

ISO 88559-5 Latin/Cyrillic

CL8MSWIN1251

Microsoft Windows Code Page 1251 8-bit Latin/Cyrillic

EE8ISO8859P2

ISO 8859-2 East European

EL8ISO8859P7

ISO 8859-7 Latin/Greek

EE8MSWIN1250

Microsoft Windows Code Page 1250 8-bit East European

EL8MSWIN1253

Microsoft Windows Code Page 1253 8-bit Latin/Greek

IW8ISO8859P8

ISO 8859-8 Latin/Hebrew

IW8MSWIN1255

Microsoft Windows Code Page 1255 8-bit Latin/Hebrew

JA16EUC

EUC 24-bit Japanese

JA16EUCTILDE

Same as JA16EUC except for mapping of wave dash and tilde to and from Unicode

JA16SJIS

Shift-JIS 16-bit Japanese

JA16SJISTILDE

Same as JA16SJIS except for mapping of wave dash and tilde to and from Unicode

KO16MSWIN949

Microsoft Windows Code Page 949 Korean

NE8ISO8859P10

ISO 8859-10 North European

NEE8ISO8859P4

ISO 8859-4 North and Northeast European

TH8TISASCII

Thai Industrial Standard 620-2533-ASCII 8-bit

TR8MSWIN1254

Microsoft Windows Code Page 1254 8-bit Turkish

US7ASCII

ASCII 7-bit American

UTF8

Unicode 3.0 UTF-8 Universal character set, CESU-8 compliant

VN8MSWIN1258

Microsoft Windows Code Page 1258 8-bit Vietnamese

WE8ISO8859P1

Western European 8-bit ISO 8859 Part 1

WE8ISO8859P15

ISO 8859-15 West European

WE8ISO8859P9

ISO 8859-9 West European and Turkish

WE8MSWIN1252

Microsoft Windows Code Page 1252 8-bit West European

ZHS16GBK

GBK 16-bit Simplified Chinese

ZHT16HKSCS

Microsoft Windows Code Page 950 with Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set HKSCS-2001. Character set conversion is based on Unicode 3.0.

ZHT16MSWIN950

Microsoft Windows Code Page 950 Traditional Chinese

ZHT32EUC

EUC 32-bit Traditional Chinese

NLS_LANG environment variable

A locale is a set of information addressing linguistic and cultural requirements that corresponds to a given language and country. Setting the NLS_LANG environment variable in your client's environment is the simplest way to specify locale behavior for Oracle. This variable sets the language and territory used by the client application and the database server. It also indicates the client's character set, which corresponds to the character set for data entered or displayed by a client application. For more information on NLS_LANG and character sets, see What is a character set or code page? in the Oracle documentation.

NLS initialization parameters

You can also set the following National Language Support (NLS) initialization parameters at the instance level for an Oracle DB instance in Amazon RDS:

  • NLS_DATE_FORMAT

  • NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS

  • NLS_NCHAR_CONV_EXCP

  • NLS_TIME_FORMAT

  • NLS_TIME_TZ_FORMAT

  • NLS_TIMESTAMP_FORMAT

  • NLS_TIMESTAMP_TZ_FORMAT

For information about modifying instance parameters, see Parameter groups for Amazon RDS.

You can set other NLS initialization parameters in your SQL client. For example, the following statement sets the NLS_LANGUAGE initialization parameter to GERMAN in a SQL client that is connected to an Oracle DB instance:

ALTER SESSION SET NLS_LANGUAGE=GERMAN;

For information about connecting to an Oracle DB instance with a SQL client, see Connecting to your RDS for Oracle DB instance.

National character set

The national character set is used in the NCHAR, NVARCHAR2, and NCLOB data types. The national character set is typically referred to as the NCHAR character set. Unlike the DB character set, the NCHAR character set doesn't affect database metadata.

The NCHAR character set supports the following character sets:

  • AL16UTF16 (default)

  • UTF8

You can specify either value with the --nchar-character-set-name parameter of the create-db-instance command (Amazon CLI version 2 only). If you use the Amazon RDS API, specify the NcharCharacterSetName parameter of CreateDBInstance operation. You can't change the national character set after you create the database.

For more information about Unicode in Oracle databases, see Supporting multilingual databases with unicode in the Oracle documentation.