Replacement of US7ASCII character set in 11g?

From: Janine Sisk <janine_at_furfly.net>
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 13:10:13 -0800
Message-Id: <87FD3417-1196-4077-8A33-58E6F3AB9CC8_at_furfly.net>



I am migrating a website from Oracle 8i to 11g, and one of the snags I've run into is the character set.

The old database has both NLS_CHARACTERSET and NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET set to US7ASCII. This character set seems to have disappeared in 11g. I tried making a database using Oracle's defaults, which are WE8MSWIN1252 and AL16UTF16 respectively. The data looks ok so far, but my client is worried about problems we just haven't seen yet.

My question: are there other choices for the two settings which would give us a better chance of having unmangled data than the ones Oracle chose? If it matters, he's worried about the diacritics specifically, though I don't think he has actually found any yet that look wrong.

Also, a couple of related questions:

In 8i, I set the NLS_DATE_FORMAT by adding a line to the init.ora file. In my Googling I have seen suggestions to set this by writing out a pfile, editing that, then converting it back to an spfile, basically doing the same thing I used to do but with the added steps of translating from and to the binary format. This seems clunky; isn't there a better way?

Lastly, the client noticed that NLS_TIME_TZ_FORMAT has changed, not to his liking. Would I set this in the same way as NLS_DATE_FORMAT, whatever that turns out to be?

Thanks for being patient with some very newbie questions!

janine

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Received on Thu Jan 07 2010 - 15:10:13 CST

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