Re: changing nls_characters set from US7ASCII to WE8ISO8859P1 in Oracle 8.0.5

In Oracle 8i,
you can change the character set as long as the new charater set you want to change to is a strict superset of the current character set. In this case we8iso8859p1 is strict superset with us7ascii. Then you can use the command :

alter database character set we8iso8859p1;

do the shutdown and startup again.

Remember to do the full back before issue the command !!!!!! Check in the manual for 8.0.5 whether you can use this command or not.

Regards,
Tommy Cusan
Oracle DBA support

Shannon St. Dennis wrote in message <392c390b$1_at_news3.cableregina.com>...
>We have an application that currently lives in an 8.0.5 database (on AIX).
>
>The vendor has asked that we change the characterset from US7ASCII to
>WE8ISO8859P1.
>
>Currently:
>NLS_LANGUAGE=AMERICAN
>NLS_TERRITORY=AMERICA
>NLS_CHARACTERSET=US7ASCII
>NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET=US7ASCII
>
>I have read that I need to backup (export) my database, then delete and
>recreate it with the appropriate nls settings. Then I just reimport the
>data.
>
>Is this the best way on an 8.0.x database? Is this the only way? I saw
 some
>metalink notes that indicated you have to do it this way in 8.0.x
>
>The real problem is the time it will take to export/recreate/import the
>data.
>
>Any ideas? And how do I change the nls_characterset on a database create?
>
>
>Thanks
>Shannon St. Dennis
>
>sstdenni_at_cityregina.com
>
>
Received on Thu May 25 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT