NVARCHAR2 Datatype in Oracle Database

In this Oracle tutorial, we will learn about the  NVARCHAR2 datatype in the oracle database. Also, we will demonstrate how to use it to create NVARCHAR2 columns for a table in oracle.

Introduction to Oracle NVARCHAR2 datatype

A Unicode data type that can store Unicode characters is NVARCHAR2. When the database was created, the national character set was specified as the NVARCHAR2 character set.

Variable-length character data is stored in the NVARCHAR2. The character length meanings are always the default and only length semantics for the NVARCHAR2 data type, hence they are always used when creating tables with NVARCHAR2 columns.

Oracle NVARCHAR2 datatype Syntax

Until now, we have understood the NVARCHAR2 datatype in a database and discussed the purpose of the floating point. Next, we will take a step further and understand how to use it to create NVARCHAR2 columns for a table in oracle.

For this, we need to understand the syntax to use an NVARCHAR2 datatype in oracle 21c which is given below.

NVARCHAR2(max_size BYTE)
NVARCHAR2(max_size CHAR)

Depending on the MAX STRING SIZE, the maximum length of any value that can be put in an NVARCHAR2 column is 32767 or 4000 bytes.

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Oracle float datatype Examples

After discussing the syntax, we will now discuss the example of how to use the NVARCHAR2 datatype in oracle 21c.

Here we will discuss how to manually use the NVARCHAR2 datatype in the SQL developer tool.

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created student table in oracle
created student table in oracle

After creating the table, we will insert the column name and provide the datatype in this example, we utilize the NVARCHAR2 datatype with size(20).

nvarchar2 datatype in oracle
nvarchar2 datatype in oracle

Now we will insert the values into a table.

INSERT INTO student VALUES ('George');

Now we will use the select statement for showing the ‘student_name’ column value

select * from student;
display the value for student_name column in oracle
display the value for student_name column in oracle

Example:

Now we will create a table by statement and check how we can use the NVARCHAR2 datatype in the given employees table.

CREATE TABLE employees (
    emp_name NVARCHAR2(25)
);

The maximum allowed byte length for the emp name column is 200 bytes, and the default character set is UTF-16.

Note that the sum of the maximum character length and the maximum number of bytes contained in each character yields the maximum byte length.

Now we will insert the values in the emp_name column table

INSERT INTO employees VALUES('George');

To obtain more specific information on the value kept in the employees table, we utilize the DUMP() function.

SELECT
    emp_name,
    DUMP(emp_name,267)
FROM
    employees;
Nvarchar2 datatype in oracle database
Nvarchar2 datatype in oracle database

As shown in the result, the datatype is and the length is 12 bytes (6 characters, 2 bytes each).

Read: How to Check Oracle Database Version

Oracle NVARCHAR2 datatype max length

Depending on the MAX STRING SIZE, the maximum length of any value that can be put in an NVARCHAR2 column is 32767 or 4000 bytes.

Conclusion

So, in this Oracle tutorial, we understood how to define and use the Oracle NVARCHAR2 Datatype. And we have also covered a few sample examples related to it.

Also, take a look at some more Oracle tutorials.