Re: Replacement of US7ASCII character set in 11g?

You can run csscan with FROMCHAR and TOCHAR set to WE8MSWIN1252. If this does not report any lossy data i.e only changeless data, then you can change the database characterset to WE8MSWIN1252 first. You need to use following command

 alter database characterset <newcharacterset>; In 10g and above this is replaced by csalter which ensures that you have run csscan and there is no convertible/lossy data.

Then again run csscan with tochar=al32utf8 to confirm if there is no convertible or lossy data. I think win*1252 is not strict superset of AL32UTF8 , so there might be some characters whose codepoint might change and can be reported as Convertible. In this case you will have to export /import the data.

Cheers
Amit
http://askdba.org/weblog/

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 6:14 AM, Janine Sisk <janine_at_furfly.net> wrote:

> Mark, thanks for that! You gave me the idea to run CSSCAN and tell it to
> convert the data from WE8MSWIN1252 to UTF8. Voila, no more errors. At
> least now I know what Oracle thought it was doing when this data was
> inserted.
>
> So (I think) what I need to do is get the data out of 8.1.7, but have
> Oracle treat it as WE8MSWIN1252 as-is, without converting it. If it tries
> to convert it, I'll probably lose all those 128 and above characters.
>
> I am going to try experimenting with this, but if anyone has any educated
> guesses I'd love to hear them.
>
> Also, sadly I no longer have Metalink/MOS access; I am doing this as an
> outside contractor to one tiny piece of a huge organization, and I am not
> allowed to use their CSI. I used to have my own, but over the years my
> smaller clients have all converted to Postgres; our database usage is
> fairly minimal and doesn't justify the licensing expense. So, no more
> Metalink for me. :(
>
> janine
>
> On Jan 11, 2010, at 11:49 AM, Bobak, Mark wrote:
>
> Hi Janine,
>
> Problem is that “LOSSY” may mean that the data is already corrupted in the
> source database, so, Oracle has no idea what to convert it to. In the case
> of US7ASCII, character values range from 0-127, correct? So, if you have
> any values 128 or greater, Oracle has no idea what character that value
> should map to. It would depend on what **assumption** the client code was
> operating under when the data was inserted. So, it doesn’t matter if
> AL32UTF8 is the “mother of all character sets”. Even if AL32UTF8 **does**
> have the character you need, it doesn’t matter, cause Oracle doesn’t know
> what that character is in the source. If it can’t determine that, it can’t
> map it to the correct character in the destination character set.
>
> See Doc ID 444701.1 “CSSCAN Output Explained”, for more info, particularly
> “B.4) LOSSY data”.
>
> Hope that helps,
>
> -Mark
>
> *From:* oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [
> mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org <oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org>] *On
> Behalf Of *Janine Sisk
> *Sent:* Monday, January 11, 2010 2:37 PM
> *To:* oracle-l L
> *Subject:* Re: Replacement of US7ASCII character set in 11g?
>
> Thanks to everyone who replied....
>
> I ran CSSCAN on the original 8.1.7 database and, of course, ran into
> trouble right away. The conversion from US7ASCII to WE8MSWIN1252 is lossy
> in a number of places. This does not surprise me terribly; Jared mentioned
> that you can put "invalid" data into a database of type US7ASCII and I'm
> pretty sure that all of the programmers who have worked on this site over
> the years have just assumed that if the database didn't choke on it, then it
> was ok.
>
> What concerns me is that CSSCAN reports that converting to UTF8 will have
> the exact same lossy conversions. The two error files are literally
> identical except for the value of TOCHAR. I thought that UTF8 was the
> mother of all character sets, so where do I go from here?
>
> As an example, one of the first errors reported looks like this when I do a
> SELECT in sqlplus:
>
> Lic. en medios de comunicaci&Atilde;?3n
>
> I will be digging further into this, with The Google and all, but if anyone
> has any light to shed, please do!
>
> janine
>
> On Jan 7, 2010, at 3:07 PM, David Mann wrote:
>
>
> When I had clients worried about character set conversions I usually ran
> Character Set Scanner utility CSSCAN on a copy of the database to check for
> differences. Here is the reference in the 10g documentation, assuming it is
> still available in 11g but don't have a link handy.
>
>
> http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14225/ch12scanner.htm
>
> --
> Dave Mann
> www.brainio.us
> www.ba6.us - Database Stuff - http://www.ba6.us/rss.xml
>
>
>
> ---
> Janine Sisk
> President/CEO of furfly, LLC
> 503-693-6407
>
>
>
>
>

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l