Oracle Commerce Platform products do not support Unicode for MS SQL Server databases. To use Microsoft SQL Server with Oracle Commerce Platform products, be sure the useSetUnicodeStream property of all SQL repository components is set to false (default). To ensure that no Oracle Commerce Platform components are configured to use useSetUnicodeStream, you can set this property in your localconfig/GLOBAL.properties file:

useSetUnicodeStream=false

If you are creating localized content, set the useSetAsciiStream property to false in your localconfig/GLOBAL.properties file:

useSetAsciiStream=false

If you are using the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 JDBC driver, you must set sendStringParametersAsUnicode to false in your URL connection string. For example:

URL=jdbc:sqlserver://<SERVER>:<PORT>;databaseName=<DATABASE>;
sendStringParametersAsUnicode=false

The sendStringParametersAsUnicode=false setting avoids Unicode character conversion and enables MS SQL Server to use indexes in queries.

In addition, to prevent deadlocks and timeout problems, you must turn on READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT. For example:

ALTER DATABASE <database_name> SET READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT ON;