2.4 Character Encoding Settings

The data loaded into Oracle Life Sciences Data Hub (Oracle LSH) may originate in many systems, and these systems may use different encodings for special characters, including characters used in languages other than English. Special characters encoded in a coding system other than the one used by Oracle LSH may not be stored or displayed correctly in Oracle LSH.

If your data includes special characters, follow the steps in the sections listed here to adjust the many settings that determine the encoding used by various processes.

Make changes only after carefully analyzing the potential impact on your own data.

• Set the database character set when installing Oracle Applications; see Oracle LSH UTF8 Requirements.
• Leave NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS set to its default value, which is BYTE. To use character semantics, which is required, see the next point.
• Set the LHS profile Use Character Semantics for Workarea Installation to Yes. See the chapter on setting profile values in the Oracle Life Sciences Data Hub System Administrator's Guide for information.

  Note:

  This setting is required for Oracle LSH and Oracle Health Sciences Data Management Workbench (Oracle DMW).
• Set environment variables on each computer where you install the Oracle LSH Distributed Processing (DP) Server; see Set NLS_LANG to UTF8.
• Add a JVM argument to the DP Server Start script; see Edit the DP Server Start Script.
• If you are running SAS programs from Oracle LSH, see Start SAS in UTF8 Mode.
• Definers who have a SAS or Oracle client such as SQL Developer or SQL*Plus installed as a development environment on their PC should follow instructions in Set the NLS_LANG Environment Variable to UTF8.