I converted an Oracle 8.1.6 database running on AIX from US7ASCII to WE8ISO8859P15. My main reason for doing so was to get access to western European languages, and the Euro symbol. I didn't want to go all the way to UTF-8 because of the multi-byte issue and concerns about performance accessing the multibytes, even though we were only going to use single byte character encoding.

I experienced no problems using the Oracle DBD/DBI, but we did have trouble with BEA Weblogic. Apparently, they supported US7ASCII and UTF-8, but nothing in between. The problems were related to persistance data. The cookie data was garbled on certain characters, causing all sessions to non-persistant.

If you are using Weblogic, you may need to see if the latest version has been fixed!

We're using Weblogic 6.1 and an Oracle database with the WE8ISO8859P1 character set with no problems. We're also running the Oracle 8.1.7 client against a 9.0.2.0 database, so the setup is a little different from yours, perhaps different enough to explain why you see the problem and we don't.

How did you fix lossy data - from US7ASCII to WE8ISO8859P15?, what approach you taken over?

But since you're changing the character set anyway, is there a reason you're not going with utf-8?

Thanks for the information. I honestly don't know why we aren't changing to utf-8. I asked a couple of people and didn't get a good answer. I think they are going to go back and do some more discussion.