My solution to ORA-12701: CREATE DATABASE character set is not known

Some of our Oracle servers are set up to accommodate EBS.

During the provisioning process of a new oracle server, the Oracle database creation failed with the following errors:

SYS@mydb01>SQL>alter database "mydb01" open resetlogs;
alter database "mydb01" open resetlogs
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00603: ORACLE server session terminated by fatal error
ORA-01092: ORACLE instance terminated. Disconnection forced
ORA-12701: CREATE DATABASE character set is not known

As part of the EBS 12.1.3 installation guide, the parameter ORA_NLS10 is pointing to $ORACLE_HOME/nls/data/9idata, where all the NLS files are unpacked during installation.

However, by default, the ORA_NLS10 variable is pointing to $ORACLE_HOME/nls/data. In my case, this directory does not contain any nls files. They have all been moved to the sub directory 9idata.

As explained in Oracle Suppport Doc ID 1058400.6 "ORA-12701 When Creating a Database": ORA_NLS parameters determine where to find the NLS characterset libraries. If they cannot be found, Oracle cannot create the database with the characterset you have requested. The error was resolved by setting ORA_NLS10 explisitly during installation:

export ORA_NLS10=$ORACLE_HOME/nls/data/9idata

and rerun the installation scripts.