Oracle UTF-8 and the Automation Engine ??

[Pothen Verghese]

Dear All,

Under the above heading in the documents page, on
https://docs.automic.com/documentation/webhelp/english/AA/21.0/DOCU/21.0/Automic%20Automation%20Guides/Content/Installation_Common/PreparationSteps/PrepareAEDB_Oracle.htm

But it is not very clear where exactly the below should be done

a) It says "In the connect string, set the third digit to "1" so that the string data is not checked (otherwise the Automation Engine cannot boot). In the log files, you can see the characters that Oracle has converted to ?, which are therefore not available.". Where is this connect string?

b) "The database client must use a 8-bit character set (WE8ISO8859P15 or similar) and you need to define NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS = CHAR.".  By default the oneInstaller does this. Do we have to do anything more anywhere else?

If there were some example to explain these settings it would help. Please note the NLS_LANG env variable is correctly set

Regards
Pothen

[Manuela Gruchmann]

Hello Pothen,

a) you find that at the ucsrv.ini under [ODBC], e.g.
sqlDriverConnect=ODBCVAR=NN1NIORO,DSN=xxxx;UID=nnn;PWD=pwd;SP=NLS_LANGUAGE=GERMAN,NLS_TERRITORY=GERMANY,CODESET=WE8ISO8859P15,NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS=CHAR

b) we have also included this in our environment variable, e.g.
# UTF8
export NLS_LANG=GERMAN_GERMANY.WE8ISO8859P15
export NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS=CHAR

I hope this will help

Regards
Manuela

[Pothen Verghese]

Hi Manuela,

Thanks for the reply.

a) In our ucsrv.ini file we have had the below settings from many versions (12.x onwards) of AA:

SQLDRIVERCONNECT=ODBCVAR=NNJNIORO,DSN=//osvr19:1234/ORADB1;UID=xxxxx;PWD=pwd;SP=NLS_LANGUAGE=AMERICAN,NLS_TERRITORY=AMERICA,CODESET=WE8MSWIN1252,NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS=CHAR

As you see the third character is set to J. And as per document the possible values are N (Oracle case-sensitive) or J (Oracle case-insensitive). So why or when does one change the value to 1?

b) We have never used env variable NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS=CHAR. This was always auto picked and configured during the install process.

So what are we missing by not have the above two settings or under what situation does one use these two settings?

Regards
Pothen

[Manuela Gruchmann]

Hi Pothen,

a) in the entry "SQLDRIVERCONNECT=ODBCVAR=NNJNIORO,..." the third character must be set as 1, if you use UTF-8 for your database - SQLDRIVERCONNECT=ODBCVAR=NN1NIORO,... -.
If the codeset and the NLS_LENGTH... is already set, nothing else has to be done
Look here https://docs.automic.com/documentation/webhelp/english/AA/12.3/DOCU/12.3/Automic%20Automation%20Guides/help.htm#Installation_Common/PreparationSteps/PrepareAEDB_Oracle.htm#link3 at the section "Oracle UTF-8 and the Automation Engine"

b) We made the entry in our environment variable just for safety, so you can ignore it

Regards
Manuela

[Pothen Verghese]

Hi Manuela,

Thanks for the reply.

a) Under our ucsrv.ini we have the below settings from many versions of AA:
SQLDRIVERCONNECT=ODBCVAR=NNJNIORO,DSN=//osvr19:xxx/ORADB1;UID=XXXX;PWD=--PWD;SP=NLS_LANGUAGE=AMERICAN,NLS_TERRITORY=AMERICA,CODESET=WE8MSWIN1252,NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS=CHAR

As we see the third field is set to J and as per the document the possible values for the third field are N (Oracle case-sensitive) or J (Oracle case-insensitive). So when and why should we change it to 1?

b) We never had to set env variable NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS=CHAR and it was auto-picked and configured during the install process. Only the NLS_LANG env variable is manually before the install.

What are we missing by not having these two settings? Or when are these settings relevant?

Regards
Pothen