Title: Message
David,
I can
share this from an Oracle Apps perspective - we upgraded to UTF8 (a multi byte
char set) from WE8ISO5599-1 (single byte Western Eur charset). Some of the
biggest problems that we faced are:
1.
Cut-and-paste produces incorrect characters which were acceptable in WE8 but
failed conversion. I.e. UTF8 is stricter in what it can display as compared to
WE8. This was pronounced in the umlaut and other Eur specific
characters.
2.
Quite a number of third-party applications do not support UTF8 - when asked
about Unicode support, many vendors didn't even know what it would mean to
support a MBCS such as UTF-8. This may also be the case with your own
applications.
3.
Middle-ware layers such as ODBC/JDBC don't work very well with UTF8 in the sense
that the rules have become stricter and so programs that used to work previously
will now fail mysteriously with vague messages (or worse still
silently!).
4. A
column which supports text elements that may now handle MBCs will
require more storage width than previously designed for. Thus you may have to
look at schema changes to increase VARCHAR2/CHAR columns..
5.
Oracle products themselves may need some patches - you mention iAS - and have
functional restrictions.
6. The
You
won't hit 1 because you are moving from US7ASCII (7 bit) but watch out for the
rest! ML Note 158577.1 is a good starting point. I would read this one (and the
related links) before the 450 pages - you seem to like reading
:)
John Kanagaraj
DB Soft Inc
Phone: 408-970-7002
(W)
Disappointment is inevitable, but Discouragement is
optional!
** The opinions and facts contained in this message are
entirely mine and do not reflect those of my employer or customers
**
We have a new requirement to support multiple
languages in at least one of our databases. I'm reading the Oracle 9iR2
Globalization Support Guide (450 pages), but wonder if any of you can share
real-life experiences regarding:
1. the conversion of existing DBs to broader
character sets
2. using
Unicode
3. implementing this with
9iAS
Our databases currently use US7ASCII with the
American character set, but we will likely need to support European, Southeast
Asian, and South American languages.
Thanks.
Best regards,
David B. Wagoner
Database Administrator
Arsenal
Digital Solutions
