title: Oracle Text will not work with NVARCHAR2. What else might be unavailable?
body: <p>We are going to migrate an application to have it support Unicode and have to choose between unicode character set for the whole database, or unicode columns stored in N[VAR]CHAR2.</p>
  
  <p>We know that we will no more have the possibility of indexing column contents with Oracle Text if we choose NVARCHAR2, because Oracle Text can only index columns based on the CHAR type.</p>
  
  <p>Apart that, is it likely that other major differences arise when harvesting from Oracle possibilities?</p>
  
  <p>Also, is it likely that some new features are added in newer versions of Oracle, but only supporting either CHAR columns or NCHAR columns but not both?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you for your answers.</p>
  
  <h3>Note following Justin's answer:</h3>
  
  <p>Thank you for your answer. I will discuss your points, applied to our case:</p>
  
  <p>Our application is usually alone on the Oracle database and takes care of the
  data itself. Other software that connect to the database are limited to Toad,
  Tora or SQL developer.</p>
  
  <p>We also use SQL*Loader and SQL*Plus to communicate with the database for basic
  statements or to upgrade between versions of the product. We have
  not heard of any specific problem with all those software regarding NVARCHAR2.</p>
  
  <p>We are also not aware that database administrators among our customers would
  like to use other tools on the database that could not support data on
  NVARCHAR2 and we are not really concerned whether their tools might disrupt,
  after all they are skilled in their job and may find other tools if necessary.</p>
  
  <p>Your last two points are more insightful for our case. We do not use many
  built-in packages from Oracle but it still happens. We will explore that
  problem.</p>
  
  <p>Could we also expect performance breakage if our application (that is compiled under Visual C++), that uses <code>wchar_t</code> to
  store UTF-16, has to perform encoding conversions on all processed data?</p>