Thread: SQL ASCII encoding
My databases are created in SQL ASCII by default. Is there some disadvantage to this? As a British user, which is the preferred character set and what advantage do I have to gain by using it?database
On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 01:35:00PM +0000, Frank Church wrote: > > My databases are created in SQL ASCII by default. > > Is there some disadvantage to this? As a British user, which is the preferred > character set and what advantage do I have to gain by using it?database SQL ASCII just means that the database will not do anything encoding related for you. It won't check it nor will it convert anything. The downside is that your apps could be uploading UTF-8, Latin-1, Latin-9, anything and there will be no way to tell the difference. Also things like upper(), lower() and case-comparison won't work on anything other than ASCII characters. If you setup your database to be UNICODE/UTF-8 then postgres can check that the stuff you send is properly encoded. In your clients you should do something like "set client_encoding=latin9" to ensure everything gets converted up. As a british user, latin9 will cover most of your needs, unless ofcourse someone wants to enter their name in chinese :) Have a nice day, -- Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/ > Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a > tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone > else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.
Attachment
In article <20060405135419.GD18401@svana.org>, Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes: > As a british user, latin9 will cover most of your needs, unless > ofcourse someone wants to enter their name in chinese :) Since british users don't use French OE ligatures or Euro currency signs, even latin1 would do.
On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 10:15:18PM +0200, Harald Fuchs wrote: > In article <20060405135419.GD18401@svana.org>, > Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes: > > > As a british user, latin9 will cover most of your needs, unless > > ofcourse someone wants to enter their name in chinese :) > > Since british users don't use French OE ligatures or Euro currency > signs, even latin1 would do. However as a British PostgreSQL user, I would really like to encourage the O.P. to use UNICODE for _every_ database. My question: Is it possible to upgrade a database from ASCII to UNICODE without dumping and restoring? Rich. -- Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd. Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com