As Allan has said... Do you homework before the switch... Both UTF8 and WE8ISO8859P1 are strict supersets of US7ASCII... You can directly convert you database from US7ASCII to either of these charactersets... However, if you convert to WE8ISO8859P1 and then later decide you should have gone to UTF8 (or vice versa) then you have a migration on your hands... On the other hand, moving to UTF8 does have potential issues... Variable length characters... Application support etc... Good luck Tim On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 10:32:35 -0400, Gene Sais <gsais@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I am upgrading my databases from 8i to 9.2.0.5. Currently, most of my > databases are using the character set US7ASCII. What character set do > most people in the USA use (WE8ISO8859P1)? > > Thanks, > Gene > > -- > //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l