Re: Fixed length data types issue - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From mark@mark.mielke.cc
Subject Re: Fixed length data types issue
Date
Msg-id 20060908183131.GA1944@mark.mielke.cc
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Fixed length data types issue  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Responses Re: Fixed length data types issue  (Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>)
List pgsql-hackers
On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 12:57:29PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes:
> >> AFAICT, most of the useful operations work on UChar, which is uint16:
> >> http://icu.sourceforge.net/apiref/icu4c/umachine_8h.html#6bb9fad572d65b30=
> > 5324ef288165e2ac
> > Oh, you're confusing UCS-2 with UTF-16,
> Ah, you're right, I did misunderstand that.  However, it's still
> apparently the case that ICU works mostly with UTF16 and handles other
> encodings only via conversion to UTF16.  That's a pretty serious
> mismatch with our needs --- we'll end up converting to UTF16 all the
> time.  We're certainly not going to change to using UTF16 as the actual
> native string representation inside the backend, both because of the
> space penalty and incompatibility with tools like bison.

I think I've been involved in a discussion like this in the past. Was
it mentioned in this list before? Yes the UTF-8 vs UTF-16 encoding
means that UTF-8 applications are at a disadvantage when using the
library. UTF-16 is considered more efficient to work with for everybody
except ASCII users. :-)

No opinion on the matter though. Changing PostgreSQL to UTF-16 would
be an undertaking... :-)

Cheers,
mark

-- 
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