Database time zone and character set considerations

You should not change the time zone of the database server that you use for IBM® Business Process Manager. The national character set required for IBM BPM is different from the Oracle default value.

Time zone considerations

Timestamps that are stored in the database are based on the time zone that is configured for the database server. Because of this dependency on the database time zone, you should not change the time zone configuration for the database server of an existing setup if timers are already scheduled. If you change the time zone configuration of the database server, the existing timers can trigger at an unexpected time.

If you have a second database server for failover or disaster recovery reasons, both database servers should be configured for the same time zone, regardless of where they are physically located.

The best practice is to have the IBM BPM server and the database server in the same time zone, preferably in the same data center.

Character set considerations for Oracle databases

IBM BPM requires that the Oracle database be Unicode enabled. In Oracle, there are two character set parameters that influence how CHAR and NCHAR types are stored in the database:

For database character set (CHAR types), IBM BPM requires AL32UTF8.
For national character set (NCHAR types), IBM BPM requires UTF8.

Note that the national character set required for IBM BPM is different from the Oracle default value.

For a more detailed description of the character set parameters, refer to the related Oracle information.