NLS_LANG problems

Hi,

We are running an Oracle 8i Enterprise Edition release 8.1.7.0.1 on RedHat Linux 7.2.

The default characterset which the database was created with was US7ASCII and I need to change it to WE8ISO8859P1, however, I am having some problems with this.

NLS_LANG is not defined in any of the following views:
nls_session_parameters
nls_instance_parameters
nls_database_parameters

If I in an sql+ session try to execute the statement: alter session set nls_lang = AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P1  or
alter session set nls_lang = .WE8ISO8859P1

I get the following error:
ora-00922: missing or invalid option

Also if I try to include the line:
nls_lang = AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P1 in my init.ora file and restart the database I get the following error: SVRMGR> LRM-00101: unknown parameter name 'nls_lang' ORA-01078: failure in processing system parameters

I have checked that the characterset WE8ISO8859P1 exists in v$nls_valid_values as a corresponding VALUE to the PARAMETER 'CHARACTERSET'.

Optimally, I would like the database to default to the WE8ISO8859P1 characterset, but I could live with just being able to alter my client sessions. What is the proper way to this without having to create a new database? What am I overlooking in the documentation?

• Tom Williams Auga ApS