Your products use BYTE rather than CHAR semantics because BYTE is the default configuration of Oracle database and is used by most Oracle users. If you try to use your products with CHAR semantics, unexpected results might occur. For example, since CHAR semantics allow storage of longer data than BYTE semantics (for Japanese, varchar(12 byte) takes four characters in UTF8 while varchar(12 char) takes 12), using CHAR semantics could cause the buffer in some products to overflow.