NLS parameters
Oracle has many NLS parameters, but only a small number affect the behavior of the LN application.
Most parameters are irrelevant, because the Oracle driver interfaces on such a low level that these parameters have no effect.
For example, the Oracle driver handles date and time values in the internal (7-byte) Oracle format. All Oracle conversions affected by the NLS date and time parameters are not used.
The
nls_parameters with an affect are mentioned later. For a
more detailed description of these parameters, see the Oracle documentation.
nls_characterset
This parameter is determined at the creation time of the database
instance. Each Oracle (client) application has a unique setting. If the
nls_characterset of the Oracle instance does not match
with the Oracle client, Oracle converts between the character sets. If a
character is not available, a replacement character, such as the base character
without accents
? or
¿ display.
While this feature seems beneficial, for an application such as
LN
that wants to retrieve the data from the RDBMS exactly as the data was added,
data corruption must be avoided. You can force the Oracle client application
(the
LN
Oracle driver) to use the same
nls_characterset as the Oracle instance.
The only way to set the
nls_characterset for a client application is to
specify the
nls_lang variable. Note that this also affects the
nls_language and
nls_territory parameters, because the definition of
nls_lang is:
nls_lang = <nls_territory>_<nls_language>.<nls_characterset>The
LN
Oracle driver verifies the
nls_characterset parameter, and an error is logged in
case of a mismatch. To avoid data corruption, the driver stops.
nls_comp
To avoid the problems as described in the section Collation and Sorting, the Oracle driver always sets this parameter to LINGUISTIC when operating in Unicode mode. When operating in Single Byte or MultiByte mode the parameter is set to BINARY.
nls_language
This parameter is implicitly set if
nls_lang is specified.
This parameter does not affect the LN application; however, Oracle error strings written in the error log file of the database driver appear in this language.
nls_sort
The default value depends on other NLS parameters, and is determined at Oracle installation time.
The parameter must be set to a supported value as described in Collation and Sorting.
nls_territory
This parameter is implicitly set if
nls_lang is specified.
This parameter does not affect LN.
nls_nchar_characterset
This parameter is only relevant if the Oracle driver runs in Unicode mode. Preferably, set this value to AL16UTF16 (UTF-16 encoding).