On Wed, Jul 20, 2005 at 01:39:26AM -0700, Janine Sisk wrote: > I have no objection to UTF-8 except that converting to it is > problematic, according to Ask Tom, because everything takes up more > space and things can overflow their storage (something else Oracle > should handle, but presumably does not). So for the moment I'll settle > for any character set that works, and worry about the Euro later. :)
Uh, you are probably going to have to do a full export and import to solve your problems anyway, so you CERTAINLY should use UTF-8 on your new database. Screwing around with random other non-unicode character sets seems unlikely to help. Note that Oracle has at least two versions of UTF-8 as well, "AL32UTF8" (which is really UTF-8), and "UTF8" (which is really CESU-8). AFAICT you usually want AL32UTF8 (which is the new Oracle default starting in version 9i), although if you need to use a dblink back to an old 8i database (which supports only UTF8, no AL32UTF8), you need to use UTF8 on the newer 9i (or 10g) database as well. > I then tried a different approach. I set up a second database on the > 8i system, still in US7ASCII. I loaded my data into it, and verified > that this time it loaded and displayed correctly. That's good, you're lucky you were able to recover to your previous "screwed up character set but data displays ok with our client software" state. You should run csscan on that database to get an idea of the extent of your character set problems. (See the link I sent you before.) > Then I tried changing the character set of the database. I thought Which means what exactly? Did you actually try the "alter database character set UTF8" method? (In your case, trying that that might be a BAD idea anyway.) > One thing just occurred to me. If I set up a second database on the 9i > system in US7ASCII and loaded the dump from the 8i system, and > connected to it from our application with NLS_LANG set to US7ASCII, I > would probably get good data. The problem here is that I have no way You would probably just be back to the same "screwed up inside but it appears to work" state you had on 8i, which is NOT a good situation. Much better to fix the problem for real. I've never actually fixed a problem like this, and it sounds tricky, so when you do finally figure it out, please be sure to let us know. -- Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.piskorski.com/ -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
