RE: Which Character Set for 9.2

>Why is the 8 bits good and 7 bits bad?
>Is there any valid reason?
>
>-- Babu

I once worked on a military contract. Since at the time it was difficult to switch charactersets in a database, I made very sure to ask if they will _ever_ need to use 8 bits. The predictable answer was, of course, "no, this is an American military system, everything in it will _always_ be in American English."

Naturally, they wound up having to handle descriptions of things for allies, with various languages.

There isn't a problem per se with storing 8 bit characters in a 7 bit characterset, assuming whatever is moving the data in and out handles it properly.

Export/import is very friendly and smart, so it will handle character set conversions for you. So if you export out of the 7 bit database, and into an 8 bit character set database, your data will be changed. I saw one case where a product had used their own counting instead of sequences, so simply importing screwed up the data once it got to 8 bits.

Nowadays Oracle includes tools with the character set changing stuff to allow you to see what might happen.

http://www.garry.to

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