Defining a Character Set for a column For oracle database tables

Question

I am running following query in SQL*Plus

CREATE TABLE  tbl_audit_trail (
  id NUMBER(11) NOT NULL,
  old_value varchar2(255) NOT NULL,
  new_value varchar2(255) NOT NULL,
  action varchar2(20) CHARACTER SET latin1 NOT NULL,
  model varchar2(255) CHARACTER SET latin1 NOT NULL,
  field varchar2(64) CHARACTER SET latin1 NOT NULL,
  stamp timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  user_id NUMBER(11) NOT NULL,
  model_id varchar2(65) CHARACTER SET latin1 NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (id),  
  KEY idx_action (action)
);

I am getting following error:

action varchar2(20) CHARACTER SET latin1 NOT NULL,
                      *
ERROR at line 5:
ORA-00907: missing right parenthesis

Can you suggest what am I missing?

Answer 1

The simple answer is that, unlike MySQL, character sets can't be defined at column (or table) level. Latin1 is not a valid Oracle character set either.

Character sets are consistent across the database and will have been specified when you created the database. You can find your character by querying NLS_DATABASE_PARAMETERS,

select value
  from nls_database_parameters
 where parameter = 'NLS_CHARACTERSET'

The full list of possible character sets is available for 11g r2 and for 9i or you can query V$NLS_VALID_VALUES.

It is possible to use the ALTER SESSION statement to set the NLS_LANGUAGE or the NLS_TERRITORY, but unfortunately you can't do this for the character set. I believe this is because altering the language changes how Oracle would display the stored data whereas changing the character set would change how Oracle stores the data.

When displaying the data, you can of course specify the required character set in whichever client you're using.

Character set migration is not a trivial task and should not be done lightly.

On a slight side note why are you trying to use Latin 1? It would be more normal to set up a new database in something like UTF-8 (otherwise known as AL32UTF8 - don't use UTF8) or UTF-16 so that you can store multi-byte data effectively. Even if you don't need it now it's wise to attempt - no guarantees in life - to future proof your database with no need to migrate in the future.

If you're looking to specify differing character sets for different columns in a database then the better option would be to determine if this requirement is really necessary and to try to remove it. If it is definitely necessary¹ then your best bet might be to use a character set that is a superset of all potential character sets. Then, have some sort of check constraint that limits the column to specific hex values. I would not recommend doing this at all, the potential for mistakes to creep in is massive and it's extremely complex. Furthermore, different character sets render different hex values differently. This, in turn, means that you need to enforce that a column is rendered in a specific character, which is impossible as it falls outside the scope of the database.

_{1. I'd be interested to know the situation}