Appropriate Oracle Character Set and Sort order for BMPS

srikanth_gundoju · November 10, 2011, 12:53am

Our client wants to implement BMPS, and we have chosen Oracle as the external RDBMS. As per the installation guide, the Character set that SAG suggests for oracle is AL32UTF8, where as our current character set is WE8ISO8859P1.

What would be the implications to proceed with our current character set?
Is any one already using character set WE8ISO8859P1 in oracle for BPMS products?

thanks,
Srikanth Gundoju

reamon · November 10, 2011, 4:42am

WE8ISO8859P1 is ISO 8859-1 West European
AL32UTF8 is UTF-8

If you anticipate needing to process data for languages other than West European, you’ll want to use AL32UTF8.

srikanth_gundoju · November 10, 2011, 5:37am

Reamon: Thanks for your reply.
Just to confirm-
We do not foresee any requirement of processing any other language data other than US English,in the coming future. Does that mean, we are good with what ever we have?

-Srikanth

reamon · November 10, 2011, 5:59am

It’s been my experience that users “don’t foresee any requirement for other languages” until the day that they need it yesterday.

I would recommend following the recommendation from the installation guide and use UTF-8.

srikanth_gundoju · November 10, 2011, 7:42am

I agree with you…
The reason I wanted to confirm this is that we were planning to upgrade our DB version from 10 to 11g very soon, and were planning to build the new DB in SAG recommended encoding, but continue with present settings until then if possible.

thanks for your reply…