Change Oracle 12c database characterset to WE8MSWIN1252 from AL32UTF8 without recreating the DB

Question

The title says it all. Could someone please provide an easy way of changing the DB characterset to WE8MSWIN1252 from AL32UTF8.

Solution

in this case "the easy way" does not exist as this is a very major change for a database. In this case this is more difficult as you are converting from a "superset" of your target character set.

You can follow this guidelines:

Character Set Migration using CSSCAN and CSALTER

Database Migration Assistant for Unicode (DMU) in Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1)

You can't use DMU to migrate from AL32UTF8.

csscan and cssalter are deprecated in Oracle 12c but I think that they are still working.

In 12c and higher the only supported option is to use expdp/impdp into a new database to migrate from AL32UTF8 to other charactersets, as from metalink note:

Changing the NLS_CHARACTERSET From AL32UTF8 / UTF8 (Unicode) to another NLS_CHARACTERSET in 8i, 9i , 10g and 11g (Doc ID 1283764.1)

Comments

[Ahamed Fazlul Wahab]

CSSCAN and CSALTER are not available for 12c. Also DMU cannot be used to convert from AL32UTF8 to other charactersets.