skoczian wrote:

> There is one thing more: even if the database character set uses one
> byte per character (ISO8859_something, ASCII, WINsomething...), but
> the connection character set is UTF8, the client gets 4*N bytes for a
> CHAR(N) field, padded with spaces. And that doesn't only look ugly in
> a tabular representation, it can trip you up working with the data.
>
> On the other hand, if the system character set is UTF8, another
> connection character set causes problems with the non-ASCII characters.

These problems should be addressed by database access layer/library (the
real problem is that most database access libraries for Firebird do not
do it, or are completely unaware of the whole issue). Try for example
with FlameRobin and you should not see any of those problems because
there's code in there to translate characters between system and
database connection charset and also code that 'cuts' chars and varchars
to proper size.

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