Ed,

E> I am not sure how to determine the default character set of the
E> database. I am guessing it is NONE.

It will be NONE unless you specified otherwise when creating the
database. Anyway what is interesting to you is rather the character
set of the column you want to write to, which may or may not be equal
to the default character set of the database.

E> In reading, it seems that I could use:

E> alter table TableName add col_temp varchar(3) cahracter set ISO9959_2;
E> commit;
E> update table set Col_temp = cast(source_column as char(30) character
E> set Octets)

E> and then drop and re-add the source column.

E> But will that get me the desire results?

Dunno. IIRC OCTETS uses #0 as the padding character, which would mean
that a #0 in the middle of the string is not going to make you happy.

There are so many things around that just don't work well with #0 that
I would consider yours a lost cause. Encrypted stuff is usually
encoded in some printable form when you need to store it as text. You
need a very strong reason to do otherwise, IMHO.

Ciao
--
Nando Dessena
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