Hey there folks,

I'm running a Informix 7.31 database server on windows 2000.
This database has the single purpose of holding all of our ERP data
(built by a brazilian company) and is accessed only by this
application that handles data interaction via ODBC, clients don't
access the DB directly. They have access to an application server that
talks to the database layer application that talks to informix. (hope
i made myself clear there.. ).

My problem seems to be due to diferent locales on the database and on
the data that is entered into it. The DB uses en_US.819 (which i
believe is informix' default) and the clients enter data that has
iso-8859-1 characters, brazilian ones.
Here's the error i get in ODBC:
Error=21005[Informix][Informix ODBC Driver]Unspecified System Error =
-21005.
and then the row doesn't get updated.
i coudn't find anything related to that error anywhere, but i'm pretty
sure that's the problem.

my question is. Is there anyway to change the database locale without
having to export all the data, dropping the database, recreating the
database with a different charset (which i'm not entirely sure how to
do) and then re-importing the data back?

the server in question (HP Proliant 370, 2x 3,06 GHz HT, 4GB RAM,
~60GB RAID 5, windows 2000 SP4, Informix 7.31 TD1) takes about 2 hours
to export the data (~ 6 GB) and around 3,5 hours to import it back
using dbexport and dbimport (is it too slow?).

Any help is greatly appreciated as i've just started managing this
database a couple of weeks ago and am still getting the hang of it.

Thank you!

Alex Soares wrote on 2004-09-15:
> I'm running a Informix 7.31 database server on windows 2000.
> This database has the single purpose of holding all of our ERP data
> (built by a brazilian company) and is accessed only by this
> application that handles data interaction via ODBC, clients don't
> access the DB directly. They have access to an application server that
> talks to the database layer application that talks to informix. (hope
> i made myself clear there.. ).
>
> My problem seems to be due to diferent locales on the database and on
> the data that is entered into it. The DB uses en_US.819 (which i
> believe is informix' default) and the clients enter data that has
> iso-8859-1 characters, brazilian ones.
> Here's the error i get in ODBC:
> Error=21005[Informix][Informix ODBC Driver]Unspecified System Error =
> -21005.
> and then the row doesn't get updated.
> i coudn't find anything related to that error anywhere, but i'm pretty
> sure that's the problem.
>
> my question is. Is there anyway to change the database locale without
> having to export all the data, dropping the database, recreating the
> database with a different charset (which i'm not entirely sure how to
> do) and then re-importing the data back?
>
> the server in question (HP Proliant 370, 2x 3,06 GHz HT, 4GB RAM,
> ~60GB RAID 5, windows 2000 SP4, Informix 7.31 TD1) takes about 2 hours
> to export the data (~ 6 GB) and around 3,5 hours to import it back
> using dbexport and dbimport (is it too slow?).
>
> Any help is greatly appreciated as i've just started managing this
> database a couple of weeks ago and am still getting the hang of it.

As you've probably guessed, there isn't an easy way to do it. At the
time of the change from ISO 8859-1 to 8859-15 in Europe (to add
support for the Euro symbol), I believe that Tech Support developed a
utility to change the character set. You should contact them if you
have not already done so, asking about it. If all else fails, ask
them to contact me, and I'll point them on to the people who did the work.

--
Jonathan Leffler #include <disclaimer.h>
Email: jleffler@earthlink.net, jleffler@us.ibm.com
Guardian of DBD::Informix v2003.04 -- http://dbi.perl.org/