At 11:34 AM 24-06-02 +0200, Christian Gütter wrote:

>Hi Helen,
>
>thanks for your comprehensive answer.
>
>I thinks I will keep it as it is and live
>with character set NONE because up to now,
>it has had no disadvantages for me.

I think one disadvantage is that NONE doesn't give you any collation order
options (other than strict ANSI order). I guess it won't bite you until a
customer insists on proper (deutscher) dictionary sort order...

I must admit that the whole realm of character sets is a neglected area in
terms of documentation. I think I might chase Dave Schnepper to give me
one of his well-articulated explanations, so at least I can improve on
what's currently in the Firebird draft manuals...

>Maybe the situation will change some day -
>then I will recreate my database using
>ISO8559_1 and pump all my data from the
>old to the new one.
>This should be the most common way to
>do it, right?

I suppose so (I haven't done it myself) but I'd not be surprised if you got
some transliteration problems moving from NONE --> iso8859_1.

>Looking at your answers, I have decided
>that maintaining more than one character
>set in a database can be very complicated
>and prone to errors, so this will be no
>way for me.

As I said, don't take mine as "the last word". I recall that, when I was
setting up the IBOOK database (database charset NONE, with all text and
blob data columns in unicode_fss,) I had a lot of headaches moving text
around. It's such a long time since I looked at that database, I can't
properly recall the details of my escapades into transliteration. <g>

It would still be worthwhile for you to post a message to ib-support,
putting "Attn Dave Schnepper" in the subject. Dave wrote most of that code.

regards,
Helen Borrie (TeamIBO Support)

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