Implementation Guide for Oracle Self-Service E-Billing > ETL Input File Specifications and Data Mapping >

Internationalization Support Settings

Oracle Self-Service E-Billing supports multiple languages.

Unicode data storage requires a Unicode Database solution, which involves creating a Unicode-based database using UTF-8 as the encoding not only for CHAR and VARCHAR2 character datatypes but also for all SQL names and literals. To implement the Unicode Database solution, the Oracle Self-Service E-Billing database character set is configured as AL32UTF8, the Oracle name for UTF-8.

The NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS parameter in the init.ora (parameter) file of the target Oracle database is set to CHAR instead of the default BYTE to enable global character semantic support.

Character semantics changed the way multibyte characters were treated in Oracle Database. Instead of doubling or tripling column or variable precision, setting NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS = CHAR causes Oracle Database to treat storage of the string 'Today' the same as the Japanese string ''. With this setting, glyphs (characters) are the measure for column and variable precision rather than the bytes required to store the characters.

Oracle Self-Service E-Billing uses the init.ora file parameter settings shown in Table 174 for the Oracle Self-Service E-Billing database instance.