From oracle-l-bounce@freelists.org Thu Oct 28 12:19:17 2004 Return-Path: Received: from air189.startdedicated.com (root@localhost) by orafaq.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id i9SHJHL26132 for ; Thu, 28 Oct 2004 12:19:17 -0500 X-ClientAddr: 206.53.239.180 Received: from turing.freelists.org (freelists-180.iquest.net [206.53.239.180]) by air189.startdedicated.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id i9SHJGI26126 for ; Thu, 28 Oct 2004 12:19:16 -0500 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by turing.freelists.org (Avenir Technologies Mail Multiplex) with ESMTP id 20C9B72DE3E; Thu, 28 Oct 2004 12:25:20 -0500 (EST) Received: from turing.freelists.org ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (turing [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id 25755-72; Thu, 28 Oct 2004 12:25:20 -0500 (EST) Received: from turing (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by turing.freelists.org (Avenir Technologies Mail Multiplex) with ESMTP id 68C0072CCA3; Thu, 28 Oct 2004 12:25:19 -0500 (EST) From: "Joel Garry" To: Subject: RE: Which Character Set for 9.2 Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 10:23:31 -0700 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106 X-archive-position: 11655 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: oracle-l-bounce@freelists.org Errors-To: oracle-l-bounce@freelists.org X-original-sender: joelgarry@anabolicinc.com Precedence: normal Reply-To: joelgarry@anabolicinc.com X-list: oracle-l X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at freelists.org >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 -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l