For the direct path unload method, Fast Clone unloads data in the character set that the Oracle database uses to store the source data. For example, if Oracle stores the data in UTF-8 encoding, Fast Clone unloads data in UTF-8. To view the character set of the source database, use the following command:

SELECT parameter,value FROM NLS_DATABASE_PARAMETERS
where parameter in ('NLS_CHARACTERSET','NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET');

For the conventional path unload method, you can define the NLS_LANG environment variable on the system where you run unload jobs to unload data with the character encoding of the target database. Use the following syntax, depending on the system type:

On Linux, run the following commands from the Linux console:

NLS_LANG=
language_territory.charset
export NLS_LANG

On UNIX, run the following command from the UNIX console:

setenv NLS_LANG 
language_territory.charset

On Windows, run the following command from the command prompt:

SET NLS_LANG=
language_territory.charset

When you run Fast Clone unload processing, Oracle uses the NLS_LANG environment variable to convert the character set and provide the source data in the specified encoding.

For both the direct and conventional path unload methods, you can configure Fast Clone to convert character data in CLOB, NCLOB, and NCHAR columns from UTF-16 to UTF-8 encoding. Depending on the source datatypes, set the following parameters to true in the cloning configuration file to convert the source character data to UTF-8 encoding: