Here's a real-life case for a UTF-xx that no single code page can
support. It was a requirement for a project I recently undertook.

A multinational corporation does business in English, Romanian, Russian,
Arabic, and Chinese. It is necessary to be able to share data in the
same tables and columns that, in the same database instance, contains
verbage in all of these languages/character sets simultaneously.

If my project was in any single language, a code page would be
sensible. However, it is necessary to support all of these languages
simultaneously, with the application being sensitive to the locale for
sorting/collation and reporting/display purposes.

UTF8 meets the requirements without extra effort. Code page support for
any single language does not.



Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 08:23:29 -0400
From: "Claudio Valderrama C." <cvalde@...>
Subject: RE: Re: [firebird-support] Writing UTF16 to the database

Ivan Prenosil wrote:

>> If anyone can name a language that (s)he would like to store in FB
>> but it is not presented in UCS-2, we can consider using UCS-4.
>
> I think Peter Jacobi mentioned Chinese.

Strange. As I remember, IB/FB supports two flavors of Chinese (big_N and
gb_NNNN) and both have a maximum of two bytes per character. What
wouldn't
fit into 2^16 unless we are speaking about very special cases?