Is there an Oracle Unicode Client on Windows?
On Windows there are two kinds of tools / applications: 1) A fully Unicode enabled applications which accepts Unicode codepoints and which can render them. It’s the application that needs to deal with the Unicode. Windows provides the Unicode API but the GUI system itself is NOT Unicode “by nature”. A fully Unicode application can only show one glyph for a given Unicode code point. So there is NO confusion possible here, this application will need to use a full Unicode font. If you have a full Unicode application, then you need to set the NLS_LANG to UTF8. Note that there are currently not many applications like this and if not explicitly stated by the vendor it’s most likely an ANSI application. So don’t set the NLS_LANG to UTF8 if you are not sure! The only Unicode capable client that is included in the Oracle database is iSQL*Plus. 2) Standard ANSI application (like sqlplusw.exe) cannot use Unicode code points. So the Unicode code point stored in the database needs to be CONVERTED t
