RESOLUTION:
Yes, the parameter must be set to CHAR. Our schema assumes the CHAR is set and some of our code would have issues . I see this mostly in Comment/Description columns for Unicode processing. Not setting this may not be obvious in most of the Stat working but will cause issues down the road if not done, and to correct it is a major effort later.
Also I have seen where we import a BYTE Stat database into our CHAR Stat database and truncate some of the data due to the single byte character (BYTE) going to a double byte character (CHAR) taking twice the space, would not fit and would throw error “ORA-12899: value is too large for column” on the import.
