Federation: Oracle code page conversion

Each time that the Oracle wrapper connects to an Oracle data source, the wrapper determines which code page value to use for that connection. You can specify that the Oracle wrapper set the code page value or you can designate a code page by setting the NLS_LANG environment variable.

The environment variables that specify Oracle code page conversion are set in the db2dj.ini file on your federated server.

If the NLS_LANG environment variable is set in the db2dj.ini file on the federated server, the wrapper uses the code page value in the db2dj.ini file.

If the NLS_LANG environment variable is not set in the db2dj.ini file on the federated server, the wrapper determines the territory and the code page of the federated database. The wrapper sets the NLS_LANG environment variable to the closest matching Oracle locale. If there is no closely matching locale, the NLS_LANG environment variable is set to American_America.US7ASCII.

See the documentation that accompanies your Oracle software for a list of valid locales.

Example of Chinese code page GB 18030:

If you access an Oracle data source that contains data that is encoded with the Chinese code page GB 18030, and your federated database uses the UTF-8 code page, the Oracle wrapper sets the Oracle NLS_LANG environment variable to:

NLS_LANG=Simplified Chinese_China.UTF8

This setting is correct if you are using an Oracle 8 client, but if you are using the Oracle Version 9i (or later) client, you must set the NLS_LANG environment variable to override the default setting of the Oracle wrapper. Set the NLS_LANG environment variable to Simplified Chinese_China.AL32UTF8, so that the Oracle 9i client translates the GB 18030 data into Unicode correctly.

For example:

NLS_LANG=Simplified Chinese_China.AL32UTF8