Choose a Character Set

Note:

If you have already installed or upgraded Oracle Clinical, you should have already selected a character set and can skip this section.

Oracle Health Sciences supports certain character sets for each product or each combination of integrated products. For TMS, Oracle strongly recommends that you use the AL32UTF8 character set. TMS also supports UTF8, US7ASCII, WE8ISO8859P1, or any single byte character set.

TMS uses the NLS_LANG environment variable to control the language, territory, and character set used for database connections. The NLS_LANG variable concatenates the three components as LANGUAGE_TERRITORY.CHARSET.

The TMS Installer sets the default value for the TMS application tier to AMERICAN_AMERICA.AL32UTF8. You set the value during database creation outside the Installer.

  • You must set the CHARSET component of the NLS_LANG variable to match the character set of the database.

  • You must use the same character set on the database tier and the application tier. If you select US7ASCII for the database tier and AL32UTF8 or UTF8 for the application tier, for example, Oracle Clinical stores some special characters incorrectly in the database.