About Oracle Instant Client Basic Light

The size of the Instant Client Basic Light library is smaller than Oracle Instant Client. This is because Instant Client Basic Light contains only English language error message files, only 37 most common character set definitions out of around 250, and only monolingual collations.

The Instant Client Basic Light version is geared toward applications that do not use legacy, rare character sets. There is no restriction on the language and the territory fields of the NLS_LANG setting, hence, Instant Client Basic Light operates with any language and territory settings supported by Oracle AI Database. However, the value of the NLS_SORT setting cannot be a multilingual or Unicode collation, that is, a collation with the suffix _M or prefix UCA in its name. Collations BIG5, GBK, and HKSCS are not supported either.

Only English error messages are provided with Instant Client Basic Light, hence, error messages generated by the client, such as Net connection errors, are always reported in English, even if you set NLS_LANG to a language other than AMERICAN. Error messages generated by the database server, such as SQL statement syntax errors, are generated in the selected language.