Dimitry Sibiryakov wrote:

> Indeed, if new ODS has only 16-bits characters size of databases
>will grow almost twice. But modern HDD are cheap and big.
>
>

Please keep in mind that doubling the size of character strings may
close to doubling the
size of databases, and while disks are huge and virtually free, doubling
the size of the
data doubles the number of pages that much be fetched per operation,
halving performance.

Is it worth paying when you need it? Certainly. But always? Well...

Everyone should be aware of my opinions of user visible tuning
parameters. But the choice
of 8 bit / 16 bit characters may be one.