Unicode Conversion

Dear Experts,

I am looking for some ideas on converting a non-unicode business data source & control tables to Unicode in preparation for a 9.2 upgrade. Based on the methodologies mentioned in numerous Oracle provided docs the common approach is to ..
(A) Create the conversion script and then (B) run the conversion executable UnicodeDataConv.exe

The only problem is that we are dealing with a 5 TB of Business data (yes I know we should first purge than proceed!) but leaving that discussion about purging apart, what are some of the gotchas and some tweaking techniques we can apply to reduce the conversion time?

Looking for some ideas..

Many Thanks,
Soumen

Once you've generated your conversion script, you can split it apart and run it in parallel from several client machines. We're a little smaller than you are (600-700GB pre-unicode), but the concept still holds.
When we ran our upgrade, we ran test conversions several times, in order to optimize the process, to get practice doing it, and to get an idea of the timing of everything. By the time we ran our production conversion we had settled on four separate conversions running at the same time. We tweaked the tables being done in each thread to minimize the total amount of time by spreading it as evenly as possible across them. I think for one of them we had a single table - F0911, just because it was the longest running table in the bunch.

You can also pre-convert your historical data (F0911, F4111, etc) prior to cut over day and merge the pre-converted and conversion day data when you upgrade.

You can get creative and devise a method which encompasses the methodologies mentioned in the thread. What I did for one of the upgrades was to split the tables and run the conversions on multiple machines. Pre converting is a good step but you need good support from the functional consultants. The copy speed / conversion speed that I noticed last time was about 20G / hour on a single machine. This though depends on how good the machine and the underlying infra is.