--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, "h_urlaf" wrote:
> I have no idea (yet) what astral planes are.

Planes 1..16 (Unicode codepoints 0x10000..0x10FFFF). For lovely
scripst like Linear B, Deseret, Byzantine Musical Notation or
Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols.

BUT also "CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B", which -for some value
of 'mandatory'- is mandatory to support for products going into PR China.

> If using Unicode is not the best option right now, is there an easy
> way to change charsets (including transliteration) on a database?

Another poster has just posted his problem in this area, and nobody
offered help yet.

I am under the vague impression, that some 3rd party tool can help you
in this.

Otherwise you have to a complete batch copy of the DB doing the
charset translation.

Anyway, it would help if you can write your app charset-agnostic, so
that it would work unchanged before and after conversion.

Regards,
Peter Jacobi