title: Is character set from the user or the database?
body: <p>I'm trying to figure out where our project went wrong.</p>
  
  <p>A long time ago, our database administrator created a user and a schema for the project we were working on.</p>
  
  <p>We gave that user to a contractor who created the tables and installed the application.</p>
  
  <p>Today I discovered that our database doesn't support UTF-8 characters and we need it to.</p>
  
  <pre><code>select value from nls_database_parameters 
  where parameter='NLS_CHARACTERSET'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The result is : <strong>WE8ISO8859P1</strong></p>
  
  <p>My question is, was the mistake made when the user was created, or was the mistake done by the contractor who created the tables?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>