Hi Dimitry, All,

I tried to start a flamewar on this (actually a weaker
version) in firebird-support but nobody bite ;-)

--- In Firebird-Architect@yahoogroups.com, "Dimitry Sibiryakov" wrote:
> I think that Firebird engine could (and should) become completely
> UNICODE-16. No zoo of charsets, no multibyte encodings with a sword
> of Damocles of buffer overflows.

a) Having a matching narrow (8 bit not multibyte) character set
for your application is such an efficency benefit, that it
should not lightly be given up. Unless benchmarking can show
that switching to UNICODE has less than 30% (to guess a number)
overhead, this wouldn't get many votes, I assume.

b) Too large a character set is a data integrity burden. It's
sad enough that FB doesn't have choices here, for example
character sets explicitely excluding control characters. But
always allowing any UNICODE character in any column just make
me shudder.

Regards,
Peter Jacobi