Peter,

> But I assume the internal UNICODE character set (charset_id = 8),
> which is wisely not visible in rdb$character_sets, must stay in
> server native byte order. So simply let that stay internal.

Agree. It's server's problem to handle unicode correctly. How it
accomplishes that clients do not care. Also check the transportable
backup format, it must be standard as well (i suspect that it is XDR
stream byte order).

Roman