Proper locale setting for Oracle DB unicode support

[John Mathieu]

We have been encountering issues with reading an Oracle DB with our HP-UX itanium system with SAS 9.1.3 or SQLPLus. The Oracle Exadata DB is Unicode but will not have any languauge support other than American.

What must the locale setting be to enable the oracle client on our server to read the remote database ?

Our current systems settings for locale.

LANG=
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_ALL=

Locale settings available for English US.
en_US.iso88591
en_US.roman8

[Volker Borowski]

Hi,

I'd give

LANG=en_US.iso88591
NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.UTF8

a try, if the DB is 8 Bit, but could be
16 Bit UTF as well, depending on what is configured in the DB.
Check V$NLS_PARAMETER and the DB charset for that.

You have the correct client SW version in place?

Volker

[John Mathieu]

The oracle DB is defined as AL32UTF8.

The oracle client we have installed and enbled for SAS support is 10gR2.

SAS documentation is not specific how to enable the operating system environment but does indicate that the characterset should be set for NLS_LANG to either AL32UTF8 or UTF8.

What are the commands required to set the LANG and LC_ALL values properly and are these two that must be set ?

[John Mathieu]

Also for the NLS_LANG setting.
Is this for the oracle client and what is the best method to enable this setting ?

Will case matter when defining the NLS_LANG version ?

[Volker Borowski]

Hi,

these are simple environment variables.
They are to be set according to the shell the
user is using (csh / sh).

so either
setenv ...
or
export ...

is the way to go. (Did I get something wrong?)

Doing a google with
"SAS 9.1.3 NLS_LANG AL32UTF8"
results only in a very few hits...

Volker