Problem:

Why am I receiving an "ORA-12704 : character set mismatch" error when I attempt to create tables in my Oracle database?

Resolution:

QUESTION
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Why am I receiving an "ORA-12704 : character set mismatch" error when I attempt to create tables in my Oracle database?

ANSWER
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This issue is only apparent in Silk Central Test Manager 8.1 (and Silk Central Issue Manager 4.0) with Oracle 9i. The problem is that the Test Manager has to communicate to the Oracle 9 database that the string values are stored in "NVARCHAR2"s instead of "VARCHAR2"s (respectively NCLOB instead of CLOB).

Firstly check that the Oracle database is created using the supported character sets which are;

NLS_CHARACTERSET = AL32UTF8
NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET = AL16UTF16

If you are unsure whether you are using the correct character sets, execute the following statements in a SQL client which will give you a list of all your character sets;

select d.parameter Dparameter, 
d.value Dvalue, 
i.value Ivalue, 
s.value Svalue 
from nls_database_parameters d, nls_instance_parameters i, 
nls_session_parameters s 
where d.parameter = i.parameter ( ) 
and d.parameter = s.parameter ( ) 
order by 1

If you still have an issue creating tables after using the correct character sets then download the following patch;

SCTM81_Patch_01_Oracle9Support.zip