IDS Forum

Re: Problem in changing locale via dbexport/dbimpo

Posted By: Jonathan Leffler
Date: Thursday, 14 June 2012, at 12:46 p.m.

In Response To: Problem in changing locale via dbexport/dbimport (OMER KHAN)

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 4:56 AM, OMER KHAN <oskhan@i2cinc.com> wrote:

> I want to import an existing database having default locale settings as
> (DB_LOCALE=en_US.819 ;export DB_LOCALE), and my destination/target locale
> setting would be in Chinese language support locale as
> (DB_LOCALE=zh_cn.GB2312-80 ;export DB_LOCALE).
>

Does the original database contain only characters from the ASCII subset of
ISO 8859-1 (IBM CCSID 819)?

If not, you have problems from the start. The 8859-1 code set ascribes a
meaning to each code point 0..255. This means you can get away with all
sorts of tricks which a less pliant code set would not allow. When it
comes to the import, the data must follow the rules of the GB2312-80 code
set, which will be much more stringent than 8859-1. Only certain sequences
of bytes are valid.

What I think you are seeing is that the original data is not valid as
GB2312-80 data.

That's the bad news.

Working out how to fix this is going to require a detailed understanding of
what data is in the database and how it was put there, and how it should be
recoded in GB2312-80. It is likely to be a fiddly process. It is likely
to involve editing the data files from the DB-Export output so that it is
acceptable as GB2312-80 input. But how you get it to that state depends on
what was in the 8859-1 data (as well as the intricacies of GB2312-80, with
which I'm not familiar - yet).

> But while dbimport, it is giving me the following error:
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> *** Import data is corrupted!
> 0 - Unknown error message 0.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I am trying to follow this link of Informix 11.50 documentation
> (
> http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/idshelp/v117/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.mig.doc%2Fids_mig_130.htm
> )
> which gives me following steps. But it is not working:
>
> Changing the database locale with dbimport
> ===========================================
> You can use the dbimport utility to change the locale of a database.
>
> To change the locale of a database:
>
> 1. Set the DB_LOCALE environment variable to the name of the current
> database
> locale.
> 2. Run dbexport on the database.
> 3. Use the DROP DATABASE statement to drop the database that has the
> current
> locale name.
> 4. Set the DB_LOCALE environment variable to the desired database locale
> for
> the database.
> 5. Run dbimport to create a new database with the desired locale and import
> the data into this database.
>

This is straight-forward enough when the two locales share the same code
set. It is not always sensible when the two locales use different code
sets. For example, exporting from 8859-1 (Latin 1 for West Europe) to
8859-2 (Latin 2 for East Europe) may work 'physically', but many accented
characters will have a different meaning in 8859-2 from 8859-1. If you
migrated to 8859-5 (Cyrillic), 8859-6 (Arabic), 8859-7 (Greek), or 8859-8
(Hebrew), the problems would be worse.

Switching from 8859-1 to GB2312-80 is more complex still.

It all comes down to:

* How did you get the data into the 8859-1 database? How did you get it
out? Did it contain any Chinese characters? If so, how did you achieve
that, and which code set are you really using?

> I need urgent support as I need to import the data of lots of tables.
>
> My Database Environment is following:
> --------------------------------------
> IDS Version: IDS 11.50 FC8W3
> OS: Solaris 10
> H/W: SunFire T2000
>

Thanks for including this information!

--
Jonathan Leffler <jonathan.leffler@gmail.com> #include <disclaimer.h>
Guardian of DBD::Informix - v2011.0612 - http://dbi.perl.org
"Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves, for we shall never cease to be
amused."

--f46d04071785ddb09f04c2717069

Messages In This Thread

• Problem in changing locale via dbexport/dbimport
  OMER KHAN -- Thursday, 14 June 2012, at 7:56 a.m.
  • Re: Problem in changing locale via dbexport/dbimpo
    Marcus Haarmann -- Thursday, 14 June 2012, at 8:11 a.m.
  • Re: Problem in changing locale via dbexport/dbimpo
    Jonathan Leffler -- Thursday, 14 June 2012, at 12:46 p.m.
    • Re: Problem in changing locale via dbexport/dbimpo
      OMER KHAN -- Thursday, 14 June 2012, at 1:22 p.m.
      • Re: Problem in changing locale via dbexport/dbimpo
        Jonathan Leffler -- Thursday, 14 June 2012, at 3:37 p.m.

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