Hi John,

Now I think I understand you request. Let me summarize it:

a) client connects to the server with USE_SERVER_CHARSET encoding;

b) server in this case converts bytes from the character set specified for
column into default database character set, then it sends bytes assuming
that client knows what to do with it and assumes that bytes returned from
the client are in default database encoding;

c) JDBC driver on attach reads the rdb$character_set_name from the
rdb$database and uses that value to determine encoding that will be used on
the client.

Correct?

If you agree to the stated above, I will forward our communication to
Adriano, he's doing new INTL stuff for Firebird. If that makes sense to him
and the implementation does not break the INTL concept in some way, I think
it will be added.

For now you still have an option to use UNICODE_FSS.

Roman