http://koti.mbnet.fi/akini/fb/flamerobin.html

Do you use FB1 or FB2 engine. FB1 has problems supporting unicode
properly. FB2 engina has "UTF8" charset which should work better than
old unicode_fss.

> I am trying to load a external table with data that has Unicode
> characters in a particular column. For that I have set the character set
> of the column as Unicode_Fss. But when I file a select query I am not
> able to see the actual Unicode characters in the column and there are
> discrepancies in the row data where the Unicode values appear. For such
> rows there a shift of data in the columns since the length data of
> Unicode code column seems to be exceeded by the actual length. I even
> tried using the cast expression on the Unicode column while selecting
> rows from it. But the problem still exists.
>
> Then I made a test application with a test database. In this I loaded a
> table (not an external one) with my data .net application and tried to
> retrieve it back from ado.net. The data is fine. But when I fire a
> select on the inserted data I see Unicode character being replaced by
> more than one character. I am using Database Workbench. So might be
> workbench is having an issue with Unicode.
>
> But the same technique when I used with external table it fails in the
> select statement, the reason being the date column in the table that get
> invalid date due to addition of characters in the previous field.