Re: French characters

>NLS_CHARACTERSET US7ASCII
>NLS_RDBMS_VERSION 8.1.7.3.0
Just to add a bit to what Jim and Frank said, you _need_ to change your character set to an 8 bit one. If you use exp/imp to do this, you will be messed up. In later versions of Oracle there are supported ways to fix this, but in 8i you should plan to unload all the data to a flat file and then reload into a db with a proper characterset (and preferably a more recent Oracle version). Of course, if you've gotten to the point of understanding when and how character translations are made you may be able to do it with exp/imp - I believe some googling of this group and poking about in metalink may show how, too.

Your data warehouse has what may be called "deferred maintenance" that needs to be performed, how exactly you do that depends on the totality of it all - how many tables actually have these characters, how big they are, if you have the data elsewhere so you can reload it, rate of loading, how clued your management is to the importance of maintenance and upgrades... 7 bit ascii is the default on db creation, this may ultimately be blamed on whoever created the database, if you need to point fingers.

jg

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