Thread: Multibyte FAQ item
Do we need an multibyte/locale/unicode FAQ item? Questions about these seem to be asked a lot, but the documentation for these items is quite good. -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us | (610) 853-3000 + If your life is a hard drive, | 830 Blythe Avenue + Christ can be your backup. | Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026
On Sat, 22 Sep 2001, Bruce Momjian wrote: > > Do we need an multibyte/locale/unicode FAQ item? Questions about these > seem to be asked a lot, but the documentation for these items is quite > good. > Well IMHO, this one is very self explaning <http://www.postgresql.org/idocs/index.php?multibyte.html> but these aren't... (from pgsql 7.1.3, I can't grab stuff from the cvs at the moment for some reason) jaa @ eowyn 114 $ ./configure --help --8<-- --enable-multibyte enable multibyte character support --8<-- and jaa @ eowyn 114 $ less INSTALL --8<-- --enable-multibyte Allows the use of multibyte character encodings. This is primarily for languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Read the Administrator's Guide for details. --8<-- If you are 8-bit speaking people (ie. iso8859-1), you will just think ok, thats not concern me. And at the that very same moment you will lose. So, it will be nice if there is more verbose help text in the INSTALL file, or even own FOR_8BIT_CHARS_READ_THIS file. I think that there is enought information after you have realize that if you would like use 8-bit chars, you have to be multibyte turned on. If the situation isn't that at the moment, please forgot me. BR, Jani P.S. There was a thread about this topic in the jdbc-mailing list starting from here: <http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jdbc/2001-05/msg00018.php> --- Jani Averbach
Jani Averbach writes: > --enable-multibyte > > Allows the use of multibyte character encodings. This is > primarily for languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Read > the Administrator's Guide for details. > --8<-- > > If you are 8-bit speaking people (ie. iso8859-1), you will just think ok, > thats not concern me. And at the that very same moment you will lose. This really comes down to the point that multibyte, unicode, and locale should be the defaults. People generally object to this on performance grounds, but that reminds me of the saying, "I can make this code arbitrarily fast if it doesn't have to give the right answer." Nor do I believe these claims, btw. -- Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net http://funkturm.homeip.net/~peter
Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
> This really comes down to the point that multibyte, unicode, and locale
> should be the defaults. People generally object to this on performance
> grounds, but that reminds me of the saying, "I can make this code
> arbitrarily fast if it doesn't have to give the right answer."
A fair point ...
> Nor do I believe these claims, btw.
Has anyone done any measurements of performance with/without these
options? I know I haven't.
regards, tom lane
On Wed, 2001-09-26 at 06:22, Tom Lane wrote: > > This really comes down to the point that multibyte, unicode, and locale > > should be the defaults. People generally object to this on performance > > grounds, but that reminds me of the saying, "I can make this code > > arbitrarily fast if it doesn't have to give the right answer." > > A fair point ... > > > Nor do I believe these claims, btw. > > Has anyone done any measurements of performance with/without these > options? I know I haven't. Would be rather silly in my case because all my base are belong to French locale... =:-D Cheers Tony Grant
i'm new to multibyte support i'm using unicode i'm wondering if i have to rethink the size of string fields (char & varchar) to allow for other languages - like is there some way of figuring out if the fields should be larger? any ideas welcome murray Bruce Momjian wrote: > Do we need an multibyte/locale/unicode FAQ item? Questions about these > seem to be asked a lot, but the documentation for these items is quite > good. > > -- > Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us > pgman@candle.pha.pa.us | (610) 853-3000 > + If your life is a hard drive, | 830 Blythe Avenue > + Christ can be your backup. | Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026 > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster