Why Multibyte Character Set?

Multibyte encoding schemes are needed to support ideographic scripts used in Asian languages like Chinese or Japanese because these languages use thousands of characters. These encoding schemes use either a fixed number or a variable number of bytes to represent each character.

Why is a character set needed?

Each character (such as uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols) must be stored as a unique number called a character code if a computer system is to be able to store and process it.

What is multibyte character set in Oracle?

In single-byte character sets, the number of bytes and the number of characters in a string are the same. In multibyte character sets, a character or code point consists of one or more bytes. ... Using character semantics, the column requires 10 characters. The following expressions use byte semantics: VARCHAR2(20 BYTE)