[hɛlp mi si junikod ɪn maɪ deɪtəbeɪs, ɔr maɪ dætəbeɪs ivɛn]

March 8, 2011 2:26 PM

I'm using Navicat Lite to connect to my Oracle research database (Mac OSX). Much of my data is in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). These are unicode symbols. Is there a way to display the IPA/Unicode in Navicat? Or some other GUI? Or is there some addon/code/plugin/whatever that will show me the symbols?

I can enter Unicode into a field, but when I submit/save or go away from the entry, the symbol I entered reverts back to the upsidedown question mark (display error). Surely I can't be the first linguist (or otherwise) to build a database with unicode characters. What are other people doing about this? How do they make it work? What am I missing here?

My fields are set to char instead of byte; all data is utf-8, even if I don't yet fully understand what that means.

posted by iamkimiam to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

It looks like oracle does not store unicode by default in the normal text field types. Do you know if your database was properly set up to store unicode strings in its text fields? I don't know for sure, but I am guessing that the frontend is much less likely than the database to be the place where this problem is occurring. If the frontend can display the text when you type it in but not when retrieve it, I am going to hazard that the database is the problem.
posted by idiopath at 5:38 PM on March 8, 2011

iamkimiam: "My fields are set to char instead of byte; all data is utf-8, even if I don't yet fully understand what that means."

Sometimes the small tag befuddles me :)

Seeing that, I suggest you try nchar instead of char, regardless of your db type nchar will hode unicode.
posted by idiopath at 5:41 PM on March 8, 2011