Overview of Unicode

Unicode is a universal encoded character set that enables you to store information in any language, using a single character set. Unicode provides a unique code value for every character, regardless of the platform, program, or language.

Unicode has the following advantages:

It simplifies character set conversion and linguistic sort functions.
It improves performance compared with native multi-byte character sets.
It supports the Unicode datatype based on the Unicode standard.

You can store Unicode characters in an Oracle database in two ways:

You can create a Unicode database that enables you to store UTF-8 encoded characters as SQL CHAR datatypes.
You can support multiple language data in specific columns by using Unicode datatypes. You can store Unicode characters into columns of the SQL NCHAR datatypes regardless of how the database character set has been defined. The NCHAR datatype is an exclusively Unicode datatype.