> You sound like you've got the background to describe the situation and
> help people understand the signficance of it. To me it's an obvious
> solution to what's otherwise a rather tricky situation: you need to
> connect to the DB using the right charset; so why not detect that in
> the process of connecting? (We just got this problem resolved in the
> jTDS JDBC driver.)

The problem is that Java provides relatively easy way to handle different
encodings - every string in Java is Unicode. This is not the case for
other platforms. If server would tell the client which charset to use,
that would significantly complicate life of the application developers.

Also I have problem convincing people that this feature is needed, as I am
not convinced that it is needed. You're the first who presented such
requirement.

Also, personally I do not understand the problem, as you can always
connect with UNICODE_FSS client encoding and, if I'm correct, all
character sets will be correctly converted into that encoding. You might
experience some performance loss, as all clients will ask server to do the
conversion, but I do not see any other consequences of this decision. The
only problem you will get with NONE encoding, but that's completely
different issue.

Roman