Re: Character set: moving from WE8ISO8859P1 to UTF8

jeremy <jeremy0505_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Could anyone point me in the direction of any guides which could
> advise on the likely steps required to make applications code work on
> a database created as UTF8 character set versus WE8ISO8859P1 (against
> which the application was developed and runs in production now)? I am
> really looking for suggested settings of any NLS parameters that might
> enable compatibility and a checklist of the things that might need to
> be reviewed.

The two things that come to my mind at first are:

1.) Alter all table columns that were created as CHAR(n) or VARCHAR2(n)

    to CHAR(n CHAR) and VARCHAR2(n CHAR), respectively.     Otherwise you may find that you sometimes cannot store three letters     in a CHAR(3) column.

2.) Set the client character set correctly (i.e. to the encoding that your

    application expects) in NLS_LANG.

It is a common mistake to assume that the client character set should always be set to the same value as the database character set.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe Received on Wed May 07 2008 - 02:38:30 CDT