Re: Character Sets

Howard is correct. In my opinion, with more databases crossing national boundaries, switching to 8bit is a good idea if you can manage the other restrictions Howard mentions. Don't forget to have your sysadmin set the UNIX box up for 8bits if you're importing into UNIX.

One small thing to keep in mind. If you export from an 8bit machine into an 8bit UNIX machine be sure to set the environment variable NLS_LANG. Even under version 8.1.6, which defaults to 8 bits, Oracle assumes a default setting for NLS_LANG of 7 bits. That means your 8bit export will be stripped down to seven bits on the way into the UNIX box, then converted back to 8 bits. All those neat little accent marks will bite the dust.

Van

"Gregory P Lechkun" <lechkung_at_dteenergy.com> wrote in message news:39C757B3.C96728B6_at_dteenergy.com...
> When creating a DB (v7.3 & v8.0), I generally use the character set
> US7ASCII for my Alpha VMS systems. I am now working in Windows NT 4.0
> (v8i), and I'm wondering if I should choose a different character set
> such as WE8ISO8859P1 (the default when using oracle database
> configuration assistant).
>
> Is this a good idea?
>
> How does this affect my import of data that has a different character
> set (US7ASCII)?
>
> --
> Regards,
> Greg Lechkun
> gpl :-)
>
> DTE
> Energy====================================================================
>
> DTE ////// //////////// Gregory Lechkun - EM&D/PDO-PT
> DTE // // // // Power Application Software Engineer
> DTE // // // //// lechkung_at_dteenergy.com
> DTE // // // //
> DTE ////// // //////
>
>
Received on Tue Sep 19 2000 - 15:38:13 CDT