Re: Characters are inserted wrong

"Robert Drinovac" <rdrinova_at_invatron.com> wrote in message news:<hS218.91$EI.630_at_tor-nn1.netcom.ca>...
> I have a question regarding an insert problem I am having using ODBC. The
> application is running on a WIN 32 system and the database is Oracle 8i and
> is located on a AIX system. The statement I have is below:
>
> insert into table1 (test1) values ('Parent Ingr 1§§ø')
>
> When I look at what got stored in the database, I see this returned:
>
> Parent Ingr 1???
>
> The problem is that the § and the ø symbol got substituted with a question
> mark. The symbols I am using are in the 8-bit ASCII range. Is there a way
> to work insert the characters properly? I noticed there is a Translation
> Options tab located in the ODBC driver configuration which I might be able
> to set to something although I don't know what it should be set at the
> moment.

This would point to (and/or)
- incorrect characterset on the Unix server (very unlikely) - incorrect or missing value of the NLS_LANG environment variable in the .profile of the Unix database owner (very likely! It should read American_America.WE8ISO8859P1)
- incorrect database characterset (issue select * from nls_database_parameters to verify)
As you specify no database version I can't provide you with the correct procedure to change the database characterset.

Hth

Sybrand Bakker
Senior Oracle DBA Received on Wed Jan 16 2002 - 03:02:25 CST