8 The Oracle Wire Protocol Driver : Unicode Support
Unicode Support
The Oracle Wire Protocol driver automatically determines whether the Oracle database is a Unicode database.
If the database character set is set to UTF-8, the Oracle driver maps the Oracle data types to Unicode data types as shown in the following table:
Oracle Data Type
Mapped to. . .
CHAR
SQL_WCHAR
CLOB
SQL_WLONGVARCHAR
VARCHAR2
SQL_WVARCHAR
LONG
SQL_WLONGVARCHAR
The driver also continues to map these Oracle data types to the normal character data types. See “Data Types” for these mappings. The only exception to this is that when the Enable N-CHAR Support option is enabled, the N-CHAR types are mapped to the Unicode types SQL_WCHAR, SQL_WVARCHAR, and SQL_WLONGVARCHAR, and the normal character types are mapped to the data types SQL_CHAR, SQL_LONGVARCHAR, and SQL_VARCHAR, regardless of the character set on the Oracle server.