Import ascii dmp file into an Oracle Unicode database

Question

Does an import from a WE8ISO8859P1 or IW8ISO8859P8 dmp file into an AL32UTF8 Oracle database, avoid the truncation problem of string fields when changing character set in a database? If a table field was defined as varchar2(10) in the source database, will it be imported as varchar2(10 CHAR) or as it was originally defined? Thanks in advance

Answer 1

If you do it properly, Oracle will translate from whatever charset your file is to the database one. sqlloader for example lets you specify the charset of the file. If it is a dmp file (ie coming from exp or expdp), then the importing tool, impdp or imp will do the conversion. Problems occur only if the charsets are not compatible, eg importing WE8ISO into an ASCII.