> Hello,
>
> in the light of a recent thread on problems transliterating charset
> none and my own bad experience with it:
> What is the purpose of character set none?
> What does it do that can't be achieved with OCTETS?
> Why is it the default charset [when charset is not specified]? Why not
> use a more sensible default like unicode, utf8 or even ascii?
>
> thanks,
> --
> Douglas Tosi
> www.sinatica.com
>

I'm sure someone else will pipe in too, but as I have been informed here and
hopefully understood.
ASCII is worse than none because you are declaring that you do not wish to
understand any chars outside 128
and Unicode would create a lot of bloat in many databases which do not and
may never intend to need unicode.
For most latin environments ISO8859_1 is/can be the chosen default.

But I'm stuck with NONE in a big way since 15 years ago noone had unicode
even on the horizon. It's no small task for me to convert everything over
now. But I can still connect in ISO8859_1 with no issues to a NONE DB.

I probably need to know more about the implications of a NONE database which
has many columns sepecified to something other than NONE as well as many
with NONE.
I now at least can ensure that all client connections use ISO8859_1. But
where are my problems going to lie? And what is going to happen when I start
using a fully unicode compliant IDE/components? Anything? Nothing?
Alan