RE: Which Character Set for 9.2
- From: "Joel Garry" <joelgarry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 10:23:31 -0700
>Why is the 8 bits good and 7 bits bad?
>Is there any valid reason?
>
>-- Babu
I once worked on a military contract. Since at the time it was
difficult to switch charactersets in a database, I made very sure to ask
if they will _ever_ need to use 8 bits. The predictable answer was, of
course, "no, this is an American military system, everything in it will
_always_ be in American English."
Naturally, they wound up having to handle descriptions of things for
allies, with various languages.
There isn't a problem per se with storing 8 bit characters in a 7 bit
characterset, assuming whatever is moving the data in and out handles it
properly.
Export/import is very friendly and smart, so it will handle character
set conversions for you. So if you export out of the 7 bit database,
and into an 8 bit character set database, your data will be changed. I
saw one case where a product had used their own counting instead of
sequences, so simply importing screwed up the data once it got to 8
bits.
Nowadays Oracle includes tools with the character set changing stuff to
allow you to see what might happen.
http://www.garry.to
--
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