Oracle character AL32UTF8

The character set determines what languages can be represented in the database.

Oracle recommends using Unicode (AL32UTF8) as the database character set. AL32UTF8 is Oracle's name for the UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode standard. The Unicode standard is the universal character set that supports most of the currently spoken languages of the world. The use of the Unicode standard is indispensable for any multilingual technology, including database processing.

Changing the database character set is a time consuming and complex project. Therefore, it is very important to select the right character set at installation time.

If the language is American English or a Western European language, then the default character set is WE8MSWIN1252. Each Microsoft Windows ANSI Code Page can store data from only one language or a limited group of languages, such as only Western European, or only Eastern European, or only Japanese.

AL32UTF8 is a multibyte character set, database operations on character data may be slightly slower when compared to single-byte database character sets, such as WE8MSWIN1252. Storage space requirements for text in most languages that use characters outside of the ASCII repertoire are higher in AL32UTF8 compared to legacy character sets supporting the language. Note that the increase in storage space concerns only character data and only data that is not in English. The universality and flexibility of Unicode usually outweighs these additional costs.