Re: ? changing to we8dec character set problems

david flinn/jennifer opp wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have a Oracle 7.2.3 server running as US7ASCII. I received
> an export file in WE8DEC. When I load it, the server "corrupts"
> the german characters to jibberish.
>
> When I change NLS_LANG in the init.ora to dutch danish, it does'nt
> matter.
>
> Can I leave the server running US7ASCII, drop the old database,
> create a new one as WE8DEC, load the data, and have things work?
>
> Do I need to reinstall the whole thing from scratch ?
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Please respond to : dflinn_at_kpmg.com
>
> Thanks !
>
> david

Hello David!

        Well here's my two cents worth. I've been working for the past few months on converting data from a variety of sources from various flat files, non-oracle RDBMS and various versions of Oracle into a new application. As you have found out, we had a problem were foreign characters that should be visible with the WE8DEC character set should be visible. Instead it turns out to be garbage.

        According to Oracle you had to use the native character set of WE8DEC so that you could see those character sets. Although this would work for the target database, we could not use this for the production database(still not convinved why not). Anyways I found a good solution that allows us to see WE8DEC data while not really upsetting the database too much.

        What we ended up doing was creating a database with the parameter NLS_LANGUAGE=(french,german,whatever in the WE8DEC set) and adding this parameter to local servers/individual machines(where required). And voila. The strange, obscure data could be seen!!

        Now for certain files it didn't help, it actually ended being a problem with the high-value ASCII codes being off. So I wrote a simple series of PL/SQL functions and procedures, placed them into the database to run at certain intervals that would scrub the data to resemble our current database ASCII value codes. This helped also.

        HTH and good luck!!

Altan Khendup Received on Mon Jan 20 1997 - 00:00:00 CST