Stefan,

    thanks for your answer.
    I think that passing through a temporary field by filling it with a cast to octets of the original field has the same effect that assuming that the original field had been filled with ISO8859_1 character set.
    See my answer to Raffaele.

Regards,
Aldo

 

> I wonder what is wrong with simply invoking "ALTER TABLE X ALTER
> COLUMN Y TYPE CHAR(N) CHARACTER SET ISO8859_1"

This will only change the metadata of that field. It will not check if
the data really is ISO8859_1. When *you* are sure about that, it
shouldn't be a problem.

Regards

Stefan