Setting the Connection Character Set
The database character set determines the encoding of
CHAR
and VARCHAR2
character data types. The connection
character set is used to describe the encoding of the incoming and outgoing application
data, so that TimesTen can perform the necessary character set conversion between the
application and the database.
For example, a non-Unicode application can communicate with a Unicode
(AL32UTF8
) database.
The ConnectionCharacterSet
general connection attribute sets the
character encoding for the connection, which can be different than the database
character set. The connection uses the connection character set for information that
passes through the connection, such as parameters, SQL query text, results and error
messages. Choose a connection character set that matches the application environment or
the character set of your data source.
Best performance results when the connection character set and the database character set are the same because no conversion occurs. When the connection character set and the database character set are different, data conversion is performed in the ODBC layer. Characters that cannot be converted to the target character set are changed to replacement characters.
The default connection character set is US7ASCII
. This setting applies to both direct and client connections.