Re: Character Sets

First that the choice of character set is not dependent in and of itself on O/S Platform (though the defaults may be).

Second, the difference between the two character sets you mentioned is one bit. Western European 8-bit ISO versus US Ascii 7-bit. The one bit means that characters above number 127 are not possible in the US version (so no umlauts, cedillas, e-acute, e-grave and those funny Scandanavian ohs with a slash through them (whose name I wish I knew, but don't).

If you never use characters 128 onwards, I guess you'll be wasting a bit per character in all your data, which could conceivably add up to a significant amount of storage space.

However, disks are cheap, and I'm not sure I'd ever worry about it (to the point where I wonder whether I shouldn't be creating Unicode databases these days just to make sure all my options for the future are kept open).

If your existing dump files are in US 7-bit format, then there will be a character conversion performed automatically when you try and import into an 8-bit database. You don't need to do anything to make this happen, but it will slow the import process down significantly. Assuming it was a one-off import when first creating your database, though, that too may not be a particular worry. If it was something that happened quite often, I'd worry.

Regards
HJR

--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Opinions expressed are my own, and not those of Oracle Corporation
Oracle DBA Resources:               http://www.geocities.com/howardjr2000
--------------------------------------------------------------------------



"Gregory P Lechkun" <lechkung_at_dteenergy.com> wrote in message
news:39C757B3.C96728B6_at_dteenergy.com...


> When creating a DB (v7.3 & v8.0), I generally use the character set

> US7ASCII for my Alpha VMS systems.  I am now working in Windows NT 4.0

> (v8i), and I'm wondering if I should choose a different character set

> such as WE8ISO8859P1 (the default when using oracle database

> configuration assistant).

>

> Is this a good idea?

>

> How does this affect my import of data that has a different character

> set (US7ASCII)?

>

> --

> Regards,

> Greg Lechkun

> gpl :-)

>

> DTE

> Energy====================================================================

>

> DTE     ////// ////////////       Gregory Lechkun - EM&D/PDO-PT

> DTE    //   //  //   //           Power Application Software Engineer

> DTE   //   //  //   ////          lechkung_at_dteenergy.com

> DTE  //   //  //   //

> DTE //////   //   //////

>

>