>>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?
>

That is both a great question and answer as I have wondered about that
for sometime now. I knew what it was in a general sense, but that makes
a bit more clear to me.

This brings up a question of my own however. For those who distribute
their applications and systems throughout the world, what are the common
steps taken or is their a common methodology to localize FB databases in
repect to character sets collation?




Lee