In order to be able to switch between languages, the translated attributes length is limited to a maximum of 2000 characters.

• Oracle uses a database character set to store data in VARCHAR columns and a national character set to store data in NVARCHAR columns. Both NVARCHAR2 and VARCHAR2 have a limit of 4000 bytes.

• VARCHAR columns can store up to 4000 characters but as the national character set can use 2 bytes per character, NVARCHAR columns can store at most 2000 characters.

Note: Valuemation is used by customers whose already populated databases use a database character set supporting only a group of related languages based on the same script. E.g. WE8MSWIN1252 supports Western European languages (Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish). While its possible to store characters in VARCHAR2 columns on such database, it is not possible to store characters from EE8MSWIN1250, which supports East European languages (Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak).

To introduce multilingual data into such databases while keeping the original character set for the rest of the database, unicode data type NCHAR/NVARCHAR2/NCLOB is used.