Choose a Character Set

For Oracle Clinical and RDC, Oracle strongly recommends that you use the AL32UTF8 character set. However, these applications also support UTF8, US7ASCII, WE8ISO8859P1, or any single byte character set.

Oracle Clinical and RDC use the NLS_LANG environment variable in the opasettings/opasettings.bat file to control the language, territory, and character set used for database connections. The NLS_LANG variable concatenates the three components as LANGUAGE_TERRITORY.CHARSET.

Restrictions:

• You must use the same character set on the database tier and the application tier. Otherwise Oracle Clinical may store some special characters incorrectly in the database.
• You must set the LANGUAGE_TERRITORY components of the NLS_LANG variable to american_america.
• You must set the CHARSET component of the NLS_LANG variable to match the character set of the database.

For more information, see Review the opa_settings File for UNIX and Review the opa_settings.bat File for Windows.