upgrading from 5.0 to 8.0.5

Hello everybody!

I have Oracle 5.0 under DOS and I'm trying to upgrade it to 8.0.5 under Linux.

I made an export file from 5.0 and I can import it into 8.0, that's not the problem.

The problem is character set, especially scandinavic special characters ä and ö.

IMP's argument CHARSET does have effect, but best result were that umlaut was simply stripped, with charset setting WE8PC850.

On the other hand, if I insert a row (into 8.0) which has these characters, they appear as '?' when selected. ( Same effect both on console or via sqlnet &sqlplus 8.0 on NT. )

select dump(field) clearly indicates that characters are stored as '?' and naturally there's nothing you can do about it then.

I have 8.0.5 (pre-release) database up with default starter database and I think I made a mistake in there and the database won't accept national characters ( means that is in US7ASCII, I think? ).

I suppose there's no way to change the character set of a (8.0) database?

I could always drop old database and create new with proper character set but includes a lot of work, so any ideas are welcome.

Tuomas
--

hosia_at_lut.fi(Tuomas Hosia) DoD#1684   \ On paljon hauskempi olla pakanana,
Lappeenranta University of Technology \ ei tarvitse koskaan olla vakavana.
Kotisivu: http://www.lut.fi/~hosia/   \      -o Eppu Normaali o-