Josef Gschwendtner wrote:

> we only store German characters within the database.
> Are there good reasons for using characterset WIN1252 anymore?
>
> Are there any drawbacks with unicode? (Performance, memory consumption,
> ...).

Main issue is the storage size of Unicode and UTF8. Since more bytes are
used per character, this means that you can have less characters in
char/varchar fields, procedure parameter, indexes and for
sorting/grouping operations. Consequently, some of your queries that
work with WIN1252 might fail with UTF8.

> Is there a way to switch from WIN1252 to Unicode without creating a new
> database and copy the data?

Creating a new database and copying the data is as easy as:

gbak -b -m database.fdb database.fbk
gbak -c database.fbk new_database.fdb
fbcopy se database.fdb new_database.fdb

Of course, the speed of such operation depends on the amount of data you
have.

--
Milan Babuskov
http://www.flamerobin.org
http://www.guacosoft.com