Question: what is the difference between database character set and national character set?
Answer: What is the difference between a database character set and a national character set? The character set is what is used for all normal datatypes such as VARCHAR2 and CLOB. National character set is used for NVARCHAR2 and NCLOB. ... WE8ISO is an 8-bit character set, so it can use 2^8 or 256 characters.