On 21 Feb 2005 at 17:39, Olivier Mascia wrote:

>> Is it necessary to store different character representations in the
>> database? Could we not choose some Unicode representation and store
>> only that, translating in and out as appropriate?
>
>This is exactly what I tried to say, in less understandable
>statements, 2 or 3 days ago.

So did I about a year ago. :-) Some more time and the idea will be
considered for FB 5.

>I would advocate for a storage representation using UTF-8.
>Pure 7 bits ascii strings would use a single byte.

No need to try to save cheap disk space. Using UCS-2 (if disregard
some dead and rare languages) allow us to avoid buffer allocation
problem. With utf-8 you never know how big translated string will be.

>With a good string class, handling strings encoded in UTF-8 is very
>easy.

But still require full scan for characters count, for example.

>At some time, this will have to pop up on the Architect list I think.

Why not now?..
--
SY, Dimitry Sibiryakov.