On 2005.07.19, Janine Sisk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Now, it seems that the default setting of NLS_CHARACTERSET in 8.1.7.4 > was US7ASCII and in 9.2.0.4 it's WE8ISO8859P1. Everything I've read > about this conversion says that since it's going from 7 bit to 8 bit > there shouldn't be any data problems. Well, hah! :) We didn't spot > any at first, but now that the client is looking closely he's finding > pages all over the place that have ?? where accented characters should > be.
If you had accented characters (octets with the 8th bit set to 1) stored in the database under 8.1.7.4, then there is NO way the character set of the database was US7ASCII. If it was, then when the data was stored it would have been transcoded to ?'s. You will need to re-exp the data setting NLS_CHARSET to WE8ISO8859P1 before doing the exp. Then, imp it back in. > Going back and reimporting the data is a last resort, as we'd either > lose or recreate user data that has been entered since the site was > moved on Sunday night. Do you have the redo logs archived since the upgrade? In theory, a clueful Oracle DBA should be able to save a copy of the redo logs in a safe place, re-exp the data from your 8.1.7.4 DB and imp it into a fresh 9.2.0.4 installation, then replay the redo logs -- essentially "recovering" the database, getting all the changes since the upgrade. Of course, this does imply that you're archiving your redo logs and you have all of them since the upgrade. Otherwise, you can do this "the hard way" -- exp the 9.2 DB as it is now, do the re-exp/imp of the old data, then write some scripts to do row-by-row comparison of all the tables. Any row that differs EXCEPT by any ?'s, is a more recent row -- update the DB with the row from the 9.2 exp. This is painful, though, and error-prone. -- Dossy -- Dossy Shiobara mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Panoptic Computer Network web: http://www.panoptic.com/ "He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70) -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
