? changing to we8dec character set problems
david flinn/jennifer opp
Hi,
I have a Oracle 7.2.3 server running as US7ASCII. I received
an export file in WE8DEC. When I load it, the server "corrupts"
the german characters to jibberish.
When I change NLS_LANG in the init.ora to dutch danish, it does'nt
matter.
Can I leave the server running US7ASCII, drop the old database,
create a new one as WE8DEC, load the data, and have things work?
Do I need to reinstall the whole thing from scratch ?
Any thoughts?
Please respond to : dfl...@kpmg.com
Thanks !
david
John Hough
david flinn/jennifer opp wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have a Oracle 7.2.3 server running as US7ASCII. I received
> an export file in WE8DEC. When I load it, the server "corrupts"
> the german characters to jibberish.
>
> When I change NLS_LANG in the init.ora to dutch danish, it does'nt
> matter.
>
> Can I leave the server running US7ASCII, drop the old database,
> create a new one as WE8DEC, load the data, and have things work?
>
> Do I need to reinstall the whole thing from scratch ?
When you say reinstall, do you mean reinstall ORACLE? I don't think
you will have to reinstall oracle. I was forced to change character
set once before and just had to drop the database and recreate using
the correct character set. This is an option that is selected at
databases create time.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Please respond to : dfl...@kpmg.com
>
> Thanks !
>
> david
Hope this helps,
John Hough
ps: get a backup before you start
Jacob Steen Due
david flinn/jennifer opp wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have a Oracle 7.2.3 server running as US7ASCII. I received
> an export file in WE8DEC. When I load it, the server "corrupts"
> the german characters to jibberish.
>
> When I change NLS_LANG in the init.ora to dutch danish, it does'nt
> matter.
>
> Can I leave the server running US7ASCII, drop the old database,
> create a new one as WE8DEC, load the data, and have things work?
>
> Do I need to reinstall the whole thing from scratch ?
>
Well check out the manuals for a precise explanationm but the basic
theme is:
Databases created with 8-bit (e.g we8dec) charsets can import most other
8-bit
charsets correctly (but some letters could/will be garbled because they
do not
exist in the destination charset). There should be no problem importing
7-bit
exports.
The translation from import to database charset is controlled ny the
NLS_LANG
parameter.
Databases created with 7-bit charsets will allwasy garble 8-bit imports
(or at
least the chars not found in 7-bit).
There is no way to chenge the charset of a running database from 7 to 8
bit.
This requires a receation of the database.
regards
Jacob
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Steen Due email: j...@ramboll.dk
Oracle DBA and application developer web:
www.ramboll.dk
RAMBOLL
Teknikerbyen 19
DK-2830 Denmark
Altan Khendup
david flinn/jennifer opp wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have a Oracle 7.2.3 server running as US7ASCII. I received
> an export file in WE8DEC. When I load it, the server "corrupts"
> the german characters to jibberish.
>
> When I change NLS_LANG in the init.ora to dutch danish, it does'nt
> matter.
>
> Can I leave the server running US7ASCII, drop the old database,
> create a new one as WE8DEC, load the data, and have things work?
>
> Do I need to reinstall the whole thing from scratch ?
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Please respond to : dfl...@kpmg.com
>
> Thanks !
>
> david
Hello David!
Well here's my two cents worth. I've been working for the past few
months on converting data from a variety of sources from various flat
files, non-oracle RDBMS and various versions of Oracle into a new
application. As you have found out, we had a problem were foreign
characters that should be visible with the WE8DEC character set should
be visible. Instead it turns out to be garbage.
According to Oracle you had to use the native character set of WE8DEC
so that you could see those character sets. Although this would work for
the target database, we could not use this for the production
database(still not convinved why not). Anyways I found a good solution
that allows us to see WE8DEC data while not really upsetting the
database too much.
What we ended up doing was creating a database with the parameter
NLS_LANGUAGE=(french,german,whatever in the WE8DEC set) and adding this
parameter to local servers/individual machines(where required). And
voila. The strange, obscure data could be seen!!
Now for certain files it didn't help, it actually ended being a problem
with the high-value ASCII codes being off. So I wrote a simple series of
PL/SQL functions and procedures, placed them into the database to run at
certain intervals that would scrub the data to resemble our current
database ASCII value codes. This helped also.
HTH and good luck!!
Altan Khendup
Senior Consultant
KPMG Peat Marwick LLP
Palo Alto Ofc.
Enabling Technology
Data Management
NOTE: This email in does not represent KPMG Peat Marwick LLP in way
shape or form.
Altan Khendup
Wolfgang Breitling
In article <32DDA0...@ix.netcom.com>, david flinn/jennifer opp <fl...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I have a Oracle 7.2.3 server running as US7ASCII. I received
>an export file in WE8DEC. When I load it, the server "corrupts"
>the german characters to jibberish.
>
>When I change NLS_LANG in the init.ora to dutch danish, it does'nt
>matter.
>
>Can I leave the server running US7ASCII, drop the old database,
>create a new one as WE8DEC, load the data, and have things work?
>
>Do I need to reinstall the whole thing from scratch ?
>
>Any thoughts?
>
>Please respond to : dfl...@kpmg.com
>
>Thanks !
>
>david
database creation. Under certain circumstances, it is possible however, to
change the characterset using a sql script. There should be no problem
changing from US7ASCII to WE8DEC. I used the script to change from
US7ASCII to WE8ISO8859P1. The script can be found on the Oracle support
notes CD or possibly by calling Oracle support. I can also mail it to you if
you like.