--- Terry Johnson wrote:

> I have been using UTF-8 / None and that's been up to the
> task. But I presume if this was done on a key field,
> then sorting would get interesting in the Chinese sense
> too. Oddly enough, I'm actually using this method to store
> Chinese. They are BMP chars though.

For BMP characters, UTF-8 and CESU-8 coincede, and
its nearly the same to use
CHAR(N) CHARACTER SET UNICODE_FSS
or
CHAR(3*N) CHARACTER SET NONE
to store the UTF-8 data.

The only sort-of reasanoble sorting you can get
for Chinese in Firebird, is using GB2312 or BIG5 for
simplified or traditional Chinese respectively.

In fact, if only Chinese matching one of these character
repertoires or ASCII go into the column, this works
far better than any of the UNICODE solutions available
in Firebird today.

Regards,
Peter Jacobi