Hi Peter,

Just a few more questions, if you don't mind:

> 1. Whereas FB internally uses UNICODE wide chars a lot (as
> intermediary step in charconv), the database store UTF-8
> on disk and direct API programming will most likely use
> UTF-8 too. This is somewhat uncommon on Win32, but not
> a real problem.

> Getting a middle layer involved (JDBC, ODBC or .NET) will give
> you the choice of a wide character interface, AFAIK.

Do you/anyone know if JDBC and ODBC drivers currently support unicode?

> 2. Using UTF-8 with 1..3 bytes/chars gives limits on field
> sizes and index lengths only 1/3 of those using a plain
> 8 bit charset.

Do you know if these limits will be changed with an upcoming release?
That's pretty restrictive

Many thanks,

David






"peter_jacobi.rm" <peter_jacobi@...> on 08/10/2003 10:55:55 AM

Please respond to firebird-support@yahoogroups.com

To: firebird-support@yahoogroups.com
cc:
Subject: [firebird-support] Re: Unicode Support


Hi David,

--- "hay77772000" <dhay@l...> wrote:

> Will this then give me full support for dbcs - sorting etc. or do I
> need more than this?

Do you think of any other dbcs than UNICODE? Please specify.

But let me think about the possible UNICODE gotchas:

1. Whereas FB internally uses UNICODE wide chars a lot (as
intermediary step in charconv), the database store UTF-8
on disk and direct API programming will most likely use
UTF-8 too. This is somewhat uncommon on Win32, but not
a real problem.

Getting a middle layer involved (JDBC, ODBC or .NET) will give
you the choice of a wide character interface, AFAIK.

2. Using UTF-8 with 1..3 bytes/chars gives limits on field
sizes and index lengths only 1/3 of those using a plain
8 bit charset.

3. FB doesn't correctly enforce the char length limit in
MBCS fields. So in a char(8) character set UTF_8 field,
you can store up to 24 ASCII characters. That is really broken.
Don't use it as a feature, as it will be corrected RSN.

4. FB doesn't know about astral plane chars, which should be
of no problem for 99.99% of all users. (It has some sort-of
support by incorrectly encoding them in 6 bytes, which should help
99% of the 0.01% affected).

Regards,
Peter Jacobi




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