Recreate DB

Can someone help me on recreating my db?

Apparently to change the characterset we need to recreate the db. What is the best method, and least time consuming method. Please give me the steps.

Also what characterset would be the best to use that would include special symbols?

thanks,
nirasha

Refer to Note 66320.1 on Metalink

Thanks so much, that was a great help. I think I am ecstatic at the prospect of not having to recreate the database.

Thanks for your reply. I just have a few more concerns. I have read all of the documentation on the Oracle site and my understanding is the following:
shutdown the database
take backup
startup restrictive mode
alter database ....
shutdown
startup

My concerns are I read the following in one of the forums there:

If your US7ASCII database contains ASCII only, i.e. no illegal codes greater than 127, then you should not lose anything. If you store non-ASCII codes in the database, some extra steps may be necessary to save....

How would I know if I ever had this???

The other thing is will a cold backup do or do I need to export the database as well?

Do I need to change any parameters in the init.ora file?

Where can I get a list of the different charsets (and what they mean/include)?

I have considered changing from US7ASCII to WE8ISO8859P1, but not sure if this is the best (i.e. include all the special symbols etc), since I don't want to do this again.

Should I also change the National character set?

Thanks once again.
Nirasha

Unfortunately, I do not have answers to those questions. I would suggest that you refer to related docs on Metalink itself. I suggest you take a a full cold backup and export.