Does Strategy recommend a specific Oracle Unicode character set, such as UTF8 vs. AL32UTF8, for support of Japanese characters in Strategy Developer?
Strategy Technical Support does not provide any recommendations on what database codepage/character set to use for Japanese characters. This depends on the requirement and what kind of Japanese characters users have. This should be decided by the DBA based on specific environment requirements.
The only difference between two encodings is that AL32UTF8 supports supplementary characters which are supported in Unicode 3.1. These supplementary characters are 4-byte ones. UTF8 supports Unicode 3.0 characters only.
NOTE: One thing to keep in mind would be that an English client machine will not be able to display Japanese characters through Strategy Developer unless the system locale is changed to Japanese.
