This looks like something that should be in the FAQ too,

Rick

>
> Problem with "NONE" is, that if you have database with either default
> character set being "NONE", or column definition being "NONE" and you
> connect with the client with non-"NONE" client encoding, read access
> of "NONE"-fields will fail. Reason is that server is not able to
> translate "NONE" character set into non-"NONE" character set (for
> example "ISO8859_1"). Also, if you client encoding is "NONE" and you
> try to write into non-"NONE" column, request will fail for the same
> reason.
>
> Now, if people have databases with "NONE" as default character set
> (quite common case), because they store only ASCII characters,
> setting client encoding to something different from "NONE" will
> prevent them reading back the information from the database. I'm not
> sure if they will like this.
>
> If you want to play with encodings yourself, use TestFBEncodings.java
> and try to change client encoding to "NONE" or try to
> read "none_field" when your client encoding is not "NONE".
>