Risk involved converting Oracle character set to Unicode (AL32UTF8 or UTF8)

Hi All -
I am a PL/SQL devloper and quite new in Database Adminstration have very little knowledge base on this.
Currently I am working on project where we have requirement to store data in Multiple Languages in Database.
After my findings via Google I am clear that our database character set needs to be changed to Unicode (AL32UTF8 or UTF8). Before moving forward I would like to know what are the risk involved doing this?
Few Question:-
Would this change take long time & involve lots of effort ?
Can we revert back once this chnage is done, with no data loss?
Will there be any changes required while wrting SQL on tables having multi language data?
As of now requirement to store data in Multi Language is very specfic to some tables only, not the whole DB, are there any other options storing data in diffrent languages like (Spanish,Japnese,Chinese,Italian, German, and French) in just one specific table?
Thanks...
Edited by: user633761 on Jun 7, 2009 9:15 PM

>
Will there be any changes required while wrting SQL on tables having multi language data?If you move from single byte character set to multi byte character set, you should take into count that 1 character my use 1,2,3 or 4 bytes to be stored: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14225/ch2charset.htm#i1006683
This may impact SQL or PL/SQL code that is working on character string lengths.
Note also that using exp/imp to change database character set is not so simple; see following message:
Re: charset conversion from WE8ISO8859P1 (8.1.7.0) to AL32UTF8(9.0.1.1)
>
As of now requirement to store data in Multi Language is very specfic to some tables only, not the whole DB, are there any other options storing data in diffrent languages like (Spanish,Japnese,Chinese,Italian, German, and French) in just one specific table?Using NCHAR character types is another possibility:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14225/ch11charsetmig.htm#sthref1493
Edited by: P. Forstmann on Jun 8, 2009 9:10 AM

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