How to change the oracle charset?

[oceanju]

I have a oracle 8.1.6,using the US7ASICC charset, I want to change the charset to ZH16GBK(chinese encode),but when I changed,the old data is code disorder.The old data is the Chinese Text.After changed the charset,the data read is "???",so I have to change the charset to US7ASICC.
How can I changed the charset ?

[sai_sathish]

I think, there is no way to change the existing characters with the new characterset even if you recreate the database with the new characterset. Only way is to identify the '?' characters and run some patch to update with the new, after you create the database with new characterset.

[Sameer]

you can change character set of database, but you need to re-import your data, because existing characters won't change...

http://oracle.ittoolbox.com/document...ent.asp?i=1601

HTH

Sameer