Changing character set with a hot standby present

[djrubin]

We will be changing our current 8.1.5 production database character set from usascii7 to western european in order to support French and Spanish special characters. We know that there is an alter database command to accomplish this, but what will happen to our hot standby database? Will this change automatically be applied to the hot standby? Will we have to recreate the hot standby?

 

[sem]

Your target character set MUST BE SUBSET of current one.

 

[djrubin]

Please explain as the documentation states that this is permissible. What about the hot standby as well.

 

[sem]

Sorry, I was not very carefull concerning your charsets.
I suppose usascii7 is included in all others.

Here is a quote from Oracle 8i SQL referece:

Restrictions:

You must have SYSDBA system privilege, and you must start up the database in restricted mode (for example, with the SQL*Plus STARTUP RESTRICT command).

The current character set must be a strict subset of the character set to which you change. That is, each character represented by a codepoint value in the source character set must be represented by the same codepoint value in the target character set.

 

[djrubin]

I agree with what you say. Does anyone know about the hot standby when we do this?

 

[rcurva]

If all changes made to the database are recorded in the redo logs, then by theory, there's no need for you to recreate your standby DB.

Only make sure that you check sys.props$ if the character set is updated in the standby DB once you applied the logs.