A commonly seen requirement is loading data in a character set different from the WE8ISO family. When performing a load with a particular character set it should be specified with the NLS_LANG environment variable. In case it is not specified this way, it must be declared at the control file with the CHARACTERSET parameter. The character set will automatically be converted to the specified character set as long as the target database supports the conversion, otherwise a question mark will be loaded instead, indicating that the target database either didn't understand the conversion or the character set at the target database is not a superset of the source character set data.

In this example a load takes place using different character sets on this table, the purpose of the table is to store a multilingual error catalog:

CREATE TABLE ERRORCATALOG
(
LANGUAGE VARCHAR2(3),
ERROR_NUMBER NUMBER(6),
ERROR_STRING NVARCHAR2(1000)
);

The first datafile to store...