Character Sets and Length Semantics - Oracle Migration

You can run the following query to see character set settings in your Oracle database:

Oracle:

   -- Read character set and length semantics parameters
   SELECT parameter, value 
   FROM nls_database_parameters
   WHERE parameter IN ('NLS_CHARACTERSET', 'NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS', 'NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET');

Sample output (Oracle default settings):

Parameter	Value
NLS_CHARACTERSET	AL32UTF8
NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS	BYTE
NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET	AL16UTF16

Note that value AL32UTF8 in NLS_CHARACTERSET means that a single character in CHAR or VARCHAR2 (not even NCHAR and NVARCHAR2) data type can require multiple bytes for its storage.