heineferreira wrote:

> I was thinking about the storage of char and varchar fields.
> I think SQL Server uses charset win1252 by defualt.
> Can I also use that in Firebird?

Yes.

> What's the difference between utf8 and win1252?

UTF8 supports more characters, like east european, cyrillic, asian, etc.
but takes more space so maximum column size is smaller (32k for WIN1252
and 8K for UTF8 column). Also, your programming language/database
library would need to support UTF8. What programming language are you using?

> The article I read said I must use coolation Unicode on every char or varchar field.

Well, this is sort-of true for Firebird 2.1 and lower. If you want data
in a column to be treated in case-insensitive way, you need to use
case-insensitive collation for that column. There is no "database
default collation", so you need to specify it for each column you create.

It does not have be Unicode, AFAIR there are case-insensitive collations
for other character sets as well.

In Firebird 2.5 you can specify default collation for the entire
database and then simply create tables without thinking too much about
it. Take a look at SET DEFAULT COLLATION command in Firebird 2.5 release
notes.

--
Milan Babuskov

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