heirkeyso wrote:

>
> Please can somebody tell me or explain to me what is the charater set?
> how character set help the database?

I'd suggest you get some documentation - Helen's book is the first
choice, but there are free downloads of old InterBase books available
too. The short answer is that string fields represent glyphs - which
are graphic representations of phonemes (in most languages). My message
is a string of glyphs. My message uses only ASCII (American Standard
Character Information Interchange, I think) glyphs which correspond to
the English alphabet, the numerals 0-9, some punctuation and other
special characters.

Other languages use other glyphs, including characters with diacritical
marks (aka accents) or even letters that aren't part of the Latin
alphabet. Some character set use one byte per glyph. Some use two,
three or a variable number. The set of glyphs for a language can also
map into more than one set of binary values.

A particular binary representation of a glyph is correctly called a
character representation. For example, in ASCII 'a' is 0x61. A set of
binary representations for the glyphs of a language or a group of
languages is a character set in Firebird terminology.

Regards,


Ann