Hi Raymond,

"rjschappe" wrote:

> When I create a brand spanking new Database, I am prompted for
> a "Default" Charset... should I leave it a None or select a charset?
> (we have never neede any accents or multi-byte chars, nor do I see
> this changing... however, I do not want to be short-sighted for
> little gain either...)
>
> I always hear about horror stories about users "pasting" in some text
> from a MS Word document containing a bunch of weird characters and
> unknowningly causing trouble within the db...

MS Word documents already contain lots of non-ASCII characters,
so whether or not you need accented characters, you already
have a character set issue.

If your app is supposed to run only/mainly on "Western" Win32,
IMHO just match the system's choices:

Set the database default character set and the connection
character set to WIN1252.

If any column looks like a need for advanced (multi-level) sorting,
give this column a COLLATE.

> I am trying to make my PK and FK domains as "quick and lite" as
> possible... so from reading past posts, I thought OCTETS was
> the "lightest" way to go... however, I noticed that ASCII does not
> behave as "naughty" as OCTETS... is this better... or should I not
> specify any character set?

ASCII is as lite as OCTETS. And you don't run into the possible
defect you just discovered. Switching from CHAR to VARCHAR has
a slight overhead, so stay with CHAR (13) CHARACTER SET ASCII for
your PK column.

Regards,
Peter Jacobi