Changing Oracle 7 Character Set

I am running 7.3.2.2 server on Solaris 2.6. My production database was created with the US7ASCII (default) character set. I have come to find out from my application vendor that their product requires the WE8ISO8859P1 character set (...now they tell me).

As I understand it, I cannot go back now and change the character set for that database without re-creating it. It sounds like the other option would be to use Solaris user envirmonment variables (nls_lang, ora_nls, etc) to control that.

Does anyone have any experience (good or bad) in swapping out the database character set? My users will appreciate it when the symbol for micro - CHR(181) - stops showing up as a "5".

Any input would be appreciated.

Michael VT Received on Fri Mar 13 1998 - 00:00:00 CST