Most of our databases are using we8iso8859p1 character set. These databases are spread accross different flavors of UNIX, NT4 and W2K. The we8iso8859p1 character set does not support the euro symbol. We need to change many of our databases to a character set which supports the Euro. The only character set which is a strict superset of the we8iso8859p1 character set is we8mswin1252. To change to this character set we could just issue an alter database character set command. We could switch to the we8iso8859p15 character set, but that would require an export/import to change.

1) Are there any reasons why we should not use this character set?

2) Can UNIX databases be created with this charcter set?

3) Are there problems with database links to a we8mswin1252 database from a we8iso8859p1 database?

4) Any issues with Oracle clients older than 8.1.7 (when we8mswin1252 was added)?

5) Are there issues with UNIX clients connecting to the we8mswin1252 database? Should they have nls_lang set to use the we8mswin1252 character set?

6) Is there any advantage to change to the we8iso8859p15 character set?

Thanks,
Steve