At 11:19 AM 18/10/2003 +0800, you wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I've been playing with Firebird and am confused what character set and
>collation to use for my database. If I don't expect to use special
>characters/symbols in my text data, is it ok if I just set charset and
>collation to NONE?? What will be the effects of this? Will this also
>affect my case-sensitive/case-insensitive searches? Anything important
>that I should be aware of?
>
>Thanks for any tip.

If you are not going to store any character data like personal names or
place names that contain Spanish characters with accents, etc., i.e. you
text data will be all US English, then NONE will probably work OK. Is this
the likely scenario in the Philippines?

Otherwise, pick a character set that matches the locale settings that your
users will use for input, that is valid for the platform the server is
running on: possibly ISO8859_1, with the ES_ES collation sequence on
columns that need to be sorted? Or WIN1252 with the PXW_SPAN collation
sequence?

What happens with NONE is that it will accept *input* of any character but
it will raise transliteration errors when it finds "wrong" characters for
operations (search matches, selects, etc.)

heLen