SYMPTOM:
The warning message below appears when trying to upgrade an Oracle metadata to any newer version of Strategy starting with 9.x and 10.x.
"Upgrading an Oracle metadata that is not using Unicode encoding is not recommended. Make sure your metadata database uses a Unicode character set. Do you want to continue?"
CAUSE:
The reason for this warning is that several features in a 9.x or 10.x metadata require use of Unicode to function correctly (some of these features existed earlier but the requirement wasn't made general until now). One of the most prominent of which being the Internationalization feature which needs the ability to store characters from numerous different possible languages/character sets. This led to only certifying/supporting Oracle with Unicode for use with Strategy metadatas as can be seen below in a snippet from the 9.x or 10.x product readmes. Non-unicode metadatas on Oracle are no longer supported. This applies to all future releases of Strategy and non-unicode metadatas will not be supported again in any future release.
ACTION:
If the metadata already has a Unicode encoding then ignore the message.
If the metadata is not Unicode then follow the steps below to move the metadata to using Unicode.
1. Configure Oracle to make sure the database user has privileges to create Unicode tables.
2. Create a new blank metadata shell (in your current pre-upgrade version of Strategy) with the Configuration Wizard using Unicode
3. Duplicate all projects with configuration objects to the new blank metadata shell.
Important note: It is strongly suggested that the option to preserve the Project ID is selected if available. This will prevent from showing duplicate Projects (with different IDs) in case of Statistics collection or Enterprise Manager reporting. For additional information on this setting, refer to the following Strategy Knowledge Base Technical Note:
KB45886: When duplicating a project, is it possible to preserve the project ID of the source project in MicroStrategy 9.x?
4. Upgrade the new metadata to 9.x or higher.
