It is important to consider the character set for data that will be stored on your database when configuring your database for use with IBM Cúram Social Program Management. For Oracle, there are 2 parameters to consider: NLS_CHARACTERSET and NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS.
- The NLS_CHARACTERSET parameter details the allowable character set of any data loaded to the database, generally AL32UTF8 is recommended by Oracle here.
- The NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS determines how Oracle interprets length specifiers on CHAR and VARCHAR columns. To handle supplementary characters, e.g. ß in German, where the storage of the character would be two bytes and could overrun the length of a defined column; the NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS parameter should be set to CHAR as this directs the database to size columns with a character length rather than byte length.