April 24, 2009 at 8:17 am
I am faced with a big challenge. Our company recently acquired another company in China and as a part of the merger process, want to deploy all the systems that are here to China as well as a part of the Globalization effort. So the challenge here is we use the default SQL server collation here whereas in China the servers and databases will be using one of the Chinese collations to support the chinese language and characters. So we are trying to decide what would be the best approach in terms of communications between servers here and in China.
1) Do we change our databases here to the Chinese Collation to make it consistent throughout? This would be a great challenge since we have several 24/7 servers and databases and all need to change. The databases are huge as well. So exporting and importing the data out and in from the databases will be a nightmare.
2) Do we change the char and varchar columns to Unicode nchar and nvarchars? This would definitely be easier but do not know if this has other ramifications.
Has anyone had any experience similar to this? Does any one have ideas as to what the best approach would be?
Any input is greatly appreciated.
Vidhya.
April 24, 2009 at 8:56 am
I haven't been through that, but the first thing that pops into my mind is that converting all varchar columns to nvarchar can certainly have effects, at least on the size of the data. Nvarchar takes twice as much storage space. Plus, if you have any really large strings, and they are stored as varchar(8000), or anything over 4000, you might run into truncation issues with those, unless you're using varchar(max).
Definitely keep an eye out for that kind of thing.
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April 24, 2009 at 10:55 am
I have been through this before only thing, I was able to do in my case is export ,Make schema and collation changes and Load the data, apply constraints .....
April 24, 2009 at 11:37 am
How easy was it for you to do the export and import? How big was the database/s? Was is a very time consuming and tedious?
Trying to estimate the time and effort involved if I had to go the import/export route.
April 24, 2009 at 12:57 pm
How easy was it for you to do the export and import? How big was the database/s? Was is a very time consuming and tedious?
Trying to estimate the time and effort involved if I had to go the import/export route.
I migrated 30 databses from data center in IL to MN .It is not as bad as you think. Two of them were critical so had setup Logshipping to remote site and broke it during cutover. Largest of the database was 50G.B.
Process for moving data is like this.
1, BCP out data from all tables in the database
2,Script out all the objects in the database.Try to Script out table alone into one script and rest of the objects into different file
3,Using any editor Find-Replace old collation with new colaltion in table script.
4,Create tables with new collation in new database server
5,BCP in the data now into new database
6, Create rest of the objects
7,user id and permissions...
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