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Thread: How to Identify the NLS column

  1. #1
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    Hi folks,

    Is there any way to identify the NLS column in the table. I am having a table which consists of 200 columns. Have to identify the NLS columns from table without viewing the data.
    GVK

  2. #2
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    What do you mean by "NLS column"?
    Jurij Modic
    ASCII a stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
    24 hours in a day .... 24 beer in a case .... coincidence?

  3. #3
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    Originally posted by jmodic
    What do you mean by "NLS column"?
    Natinal Language Set column . Other than english (default - single byte). we have some Japanese character set values in the some columns. so we used to call NLS columns.
    GVK

  4. #4
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    OK, so those column must be of type NCHAR, NVARCHAR2 or NCLOB. So simply describe your table and find those columns. Or you can:

    SELECT column_name, data_type FROM user_tab_columns
    WHERE table_name = 'MY_TABLE' AND data_type IN ('NCHAR', 'NVARCHAR2', NCLOB');
    Jurij Modic
    ASCII a stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
    24 hours in a day .... 24 beer in a case .... coincidence?

  5. #5
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    Not necessarily. On one of our old 7.3.4 UNIX boxes we have Japanese characters stored in VARCHAR2 datatypes using the US7ASCII characterset.

    Doing a desc of the table does not show which columns contain these characters. Also, there is a mix of Japanese and English in the same columns.

    Fun fun fun!
    Tim...
    OCP DBA 7.3, 8, 8i, 9i, 10g, 11g
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    My website: oracle-base.com
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  6. #6
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    Originally posted by TimHall
    Not necessarily. On one of our old 7.3.4 UNIX boxes we have Japanese characters stored in VARCHAR2 datatypes using the US7ASCII characterset.
    I wonder how this can be!? AFAIK US7ASCII is 7-byte characterset, so it properly stores only ASCII codes from 0 to 127. You can't even store West European special characters in there, because MSB bit is trimmed off, so I wonder how were you able to stuff Japanese characters in there (or beter to say, how did you manage to retrieve them properly afterwards)?
    Jurij Modic
    ASCII a stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
    24 hours in a day .... 24 beer in a case .... coincidence?

  7. #7
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    To be honest I'm not totally sure. I wasn't here when it got set up.

    It works through a third party bit of software. When a Japanese character is typed the software notices, converts it to two individual character codes that represent the multibyte character. These are then stored in the database.

    When a select is done you just get gibberish (non-printable characters) unless you are running this software. When the software is running it intercepts certain character code combinations and translates them to a multibyte character set and sends that data to windows. This means that SQL*Plus shows Japanese characters on screen.

    It works pretty well. At the time the Oracle unicode implementation was so dodgy that Oracle recommended waiting until Oracle 8 was released, which was not an option at the time.

    The software is called NJWIN. Not sure what version they use here as it's a client tool and I'm not involved in that project much.

    [Edited by TimHall on 01-28-2002 at 06:48 AM]
    Tim...
    OCP DBA 7.3, 8, 8i, 9i, 10g, 11g
    OCA PL/SQL Developer
    Oracle ACE Director
    My website: oracle-base.com
    My blog: oracle-base.com/blog

  8. #8
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    Ah, yes, this makes sence....
    Jurij Modic
    ASCII a stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
    24 hours in a day .... 24 beer in a case .... coincidence?

  9. #9
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    Getsu yobi daigaku ni basu de ikimasu!

    Please excuse spelling. It's several years since I last attended a Japanese class and this is all I can remember now
    Tim...
    OCP DBA 7.3, 8, 8i, 9i, 10g, 11g
    OCA PL/SQL Developer
    Oracle ACE Director
    My website: oracle-base.com
    My blog: oracle-base.com/blog

  10. #10
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    Originally posted by TimHall
    Getsu yobi daigaku ni basu de ikimasu!
    Ah yes, now it makes sence even more!
    Jurij Modic
    ASCII a stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
    24 hours in a day .... 24 beer in a case .... coincidence?

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