Re: A hypothetical hack

Dear Tom, Interesting problem. On Feb 7, 2008 7:41 PM, Thomas J. Girsch <tgirsch@nospam.gmail.com> wrote: > Suppose I had a really big database. Suppose it's about 1.5 TB. Now > suppose that it's got all standard ASCII in it, with no > internationalization, and no NCHAR or NVARCHAR fields. Now suppose it's > currently set up with the default en_US.819 locale. > > Got it? Good. Got it - it's big. You might have to buy two disk drives to fit all the data on; four if you want to do some RAID 10 on them. More seriously, it would take a while to unload and then load back up again. And even with the price and size of flash drives these days, it would take a while to back it up to 4 GB units - and you'd need a lot of them (nearly 400 of them, I fear). Labelling might be the biggest problem :) > Now suppose a new requirement came up for internationalized data. And > suppose we wanted to use UTF8 for this internationalization. Further, > suppose we don't have an extra 1.5 TB laying around to do a huge migration. > > I understand that this is the sort of suggestion that gives IBM > engineers nightmares, but what would be the problem with just magically > changing some flags somewhere so that the database thinks its locale is > en_US.UTF8 and that it has been that locale all along? Sure seems to > beat a protracted migration, and I don't see what the problem would be, > since there's no internationalized data right now... > > Thoughts? Lectures? Doomsday predictions? If you find all the spaces and can expand the space by 1 byte (from en_US.819 to en_US.UTF8 or whatever the CCSID number is for UTF-8), then it might work. I'm not sure that you'd be able to approach Tech Support with problems - as you're aware, people there justifiably do not like dealing with systems that have been tampered with, and they would regard that as tampering. Doomsday predictions? Come Doomsday, it won't matter whether the system is using UTF-8 or 8859-1; either way, it won't work afterwards. -- Jonathan Leffler #include <disclaimer.h> Email: jleffler@earthlink.net, jleffler@us.ibm.com Guardian of DBD::Informix v2007.0914 -- http://dbi.perl.org/ NB: Please do not use this email for correspondence. I don't necessarily read it every week, even.