Oracle Char-Set

[TriMet Jira Administrator]

I have an Oracle database with the following Characterset, will that be an issue installing Jira Service Desk?

NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET
AL16UTF16
NCHAR Character set

NLS_CHARACTERSET
WE8MSWIN1252
Character set

[somethingblue · Accepted solution]

Hi Christopher,

Take a look at Connecting JIRA applications to Oracle:

• Ensure your database is configured to use the same character encoding as JIRA. The recommended encoding is AL32UTF8 (the Oracle equivalent of Unicode UTF-8).

This specifically has to do with language support as the Supporting Multilingual Databases with Unicode states document from Oracle:

Enabling Multilingual Support with Unicode Databases

The database character set specifies the encoding to be used in the SQL CHAR datatypes as well as the metadata such as table names, column names, and SQL statements. A Unicode database is a database with a UTF-8 character set as the database character set. There are three Oracle character sets that implement the UTF-8 encoding. The first two are designed for ASCII-based platforms while the third one should be used on EBCDIC platforms.

• AL32UTF8

  The AL32UTF8 character set supports the latest version of the Unicode standard. It encodes characters in one, two, or three bytes. Supplementary characters require four bytes. It is for ASCII-based platforms.

• UTF8

  The UTF8 character set encodes characters in one, two, or three bytes. It is for ASCII-based platforms.

  The UTF8 character set has supported Unicode 3.0 since Oracle8i release 8.1.7 and will continue to support Unicode 3.0 in future releases of Oracle Database. Although specific supplementary characters were not assigned code points in Unicode until version 3.1, the code point range was allocated for supplementary characters in Unicode 3.0. If supplementary characters are inserted into a UTF8 database, then it does not corrupt the data in the database. The supplementary characters are treated as two separate, user-defined characters that occupy 6 bytes. Oracle recommends that you switch to AL32UTF8 for full support of supplementary characters in the database character set.

Hopefully this helps clear things up a bit.

Cheers,

Branden