Re: EXP/IMP charset conversion, Please help me ...

There's no real answer as to which is the 'right' setting.... it all depends. But I'll tell you that some of the 9i documentation suggests that your Character Set should be something like WE8ISO8859P1 with a UTF8 national character set -and that all your tables should only contain NCHAR or NVARCHAR2 columns.

The reasoning behind that is that the database character set is really intended to establish the language of the data dictionary and other internal tables. For your own data, if there's ever a chance that you might need foreign characters, you're better off from the word go using the national language options.

Of course, if you are never, ever going to use foreign characters, opting for UTF8 in all your tables is a bit of overkill. But it gives you flexibility.

Regards
HJR

--
Resources for Oracle: http://www.hjrdba.com
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"Patrick Mau" <mau_at_tony.dorf.wh.uni-dortmund.de> wrote in message
news:slrna0a8nu.ij2.mau_at_tony.local.net...


> I have two databases.

> The first one was created with

>

> create database test1

>         character set "WE8ISO8859P1"

>         national character set "UTF8"

>

> The second one was created using

>

> create database test1

>     character set UTF8

>     national character set WE8ISO8859P1

>

> I exported the first one. No I try to import

> the data into the second database. IMP says:

>

> Export file created by EXPORT:V08.01.06 via conventional path

> import done in WE8ISO8859P1 character set and WE8ISO8859P1 NCHAR character

set


> import server uses UTF8 character set (possible charset conversion)

> export server uses UTF8 NCHAR character set (possible ncharset conversion)

>

> I have two qwuestions.

>

> 1)

> I think the second setting is "more correct", because the database

> stores the data in UTF8 and uses the national character set WE8ISO8859P1.

>

> Am I wrong about that ?

>

> 2)

> How do I use IMP so that no conversion occurs ?

>

> Please help me ;o) I need to import a large dataset ASAP and

> I don't want to re-create the database.

>

> I would be very pleased if you could Cc me on the reply.

>

> Thanks a lot (really ...)

> Patrick Mau