Hi Folks,
I have for many years now been using firebird, however I have only every used character set NONE.

With the improved UTF support in Firebird 2.1, (and due to some formatting problems with none ascii characters) I have decided to move away from NONE to some other character set. Most of my data has been entered via windows (using win 1252) but is displayed via java (UTF-8).

So, some questions:

1. Which character set should I default to on the server. My gut feel is UTF-8, as the read speed to java is more important than the write speed but are there any problems/disadvantages with UTF-8.

2. I will need to move all my data to a fresh database declared with UTF-8. Could I use fbcopy to do this, connecting to the source database with chasrset NONE and the destination with charset win1252. Would this then correctly encode the none-ascii characters in the new database?

3. Going forward, I will need to provide a connection character set. If this is not supplied, does firebird use the default OS character set?

Thanks in advance
Ian Newby