OGG-01194 – Oracle Golden Gate CHARSET mismatch

When entertaining the loathsome idea of shipping an established Oracle data set to MSSQL (SQL Server 2014, Oracle 12c, and OGG 12.3 in this case), you may run into an issue that presents itself in the following form in your EXTRACT report:

WARNING OGG-01194
EXTRACT task RINI9001 abended : Conversion from character set UTF-8 of source column <COLUMN_NAME> to character set windows-1252 of target column <COLUMN_NAME> failed because the source column contains a character 'ef 81 8a' at offset 123 that is not available in the target character set.

THE PROBLEM?:

Essentially, the issue is that you are trying to have your REPLICAT process convert Unicode data into a CHARSET where that Unicode character doesn’t exist. This is the default behaviour of REPLICAT, it will always try to convert source data charsets to the target machine native.

RESOLUTION:

This can be controlled with “SOURCECHARSET” parameter in your REPLICAT task param file. Specifically “SOURCECHARSET PASSTHRU”. Using this parameter will force REPLICAT to blindly import the source data and not try to convert it to the native charset of the target machine.

More information on SOURCECHARSET here