RE: Change Character sets

Sounds to me like someone exported their old database into a new one and now have characters showing up as '?' when there was something meaningful before. BTDT. The problem is that your NCHAR/NLS_LANG setting did not match the database character set. This can happen at two points in the process. Here is what happen to me, see if it matches your case:

	Original database created with US7ASCII and then changed to WE8ISO8859P1.
	Client workstation was set up as WE8ISO8859P1 from WAY back, prior to database character set change.
	Export was taken using NLS_LANG=American_america.US7ASCII.
	Import doen using NLS_LANG=American_america.WE8ISO8859P1
	Lots of data started showing up with '?''s in the middle of words, etc...

Solution:

        Take a new export of the affected tables from the original database using the right NLS_LANG setting & use that to replace them in the new database.

Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA
Oracle Certified 8i DBA

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 1:44 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Actually, WE8ISO8859P1 *is* a superset of US7ASCII, which is how we were able to do the same ALTER DATABASE (in 8.1.7.2 at the time) you mentioned.

Check out
http://metalink.oracle.com/metalink/plsql/ml2_documents.showDocument?p_id=11 9164.1&p_database_id=NOT

(pasting the link together) for a list of valid supersets. Your combo is sixth in the list.

Rich

Rich Jesse                           System/Database Administrator
rjesse_at_qtiworld.com                  Quad/Tech Inc, Sussex, WI USA

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Thomas Day [mailto:tday6_at_csc.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 12:34 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> Subject: Change Character sets
>
>
>
> I have a database that was populated using an export from an US7ASCII
> Oracle database. The current database is WE8ISO8859P1 which is not a
> superset of US7ASCII. So I can't change the characterset
> using the ALTER
> DATABASE as the manual suggests. The alternative is to export the
> database, drop the current instance, create a new instance
> with the correct
> characterset and import the old database.
>
> But I know that there is no data in the database that was not
> supported in
> the US7ASCII database. Is there a shortcut? The UPDATE
> sys.PROPS$ trick
> is a no-go.

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