The SQL_ASCII setting behaves considerably differently from the other settings. When the server character set is SQL_ASCII, the server interprets byte values 0-127 according to the ASCII standard, while byte values 128-255 are taken as uninterpreted characters. No encoding conversion will be done when the setting is SQL_ASCII. Thus, this setting is not so much a declaration that a specific encoding is in use, as a declaration of ignorance about the encoding. In most cases, if you are working with any non-ASCII data, it is unwise to use the SQL_ASCII setting because PostgreSQL will be unable to help you by converting or validating non-ASCII characters.
So the path to force the client_encoding might not be wise.
Our database enoding is "SQL_ASCII". JDBC's client_encoding is "UTF-8" We're making the leap from pg9.2 to 9.6... and existing code has started throwing exceptions:
"9.4 is intentionally less lax about that than prior versions" (regarding character data not supported by the client encoding)
We've decided to force the JDBC client_encoding to "SQL_ASCII". Per the docs, "allowEncodingChanges" will allow "SET client_encoding..." execution; However, I'm wondering if there is a way to force the connection to use a particular encoding to begin with?
I've tried "props.setProperty('client_encoding', ...)" without success.
