Re: [ADMIN] postgres & server encodings

Not that I am an expert or anything, but my initial data base was SQLASCII
and I did have to convert it to Unicode.
My reasons were we store French characters in our database and the newer
odbc driver was not displaying them correctly coming from SQLASCII, but was
from UNICODE.
I also think that it can affect functions like length and upper, but Tom
knows a ton more then me about this stuff.

I did my initial conversion on 7.4 and the odbc driver at that time had no
issues with SQLASCII displaying the French, but I think in 8.0.1 I started
seeing an issue. The latest version of the driver 8.0.4 seems to be working
well (only up a little over 24 hours thus far).

I wish I had used a unicode data base from the start (7.4 driver was what I
used and it did not like moving from MSSQL to Unicode). I later switched to
.net (npgsql objects) for my conversion and used a encoding object to write
the data correctly.

Joel Fradkin

Wazagua, Inc.
2520 Trailmate Dr
Sarasota, Florida 34243
Tel.  941-753-7111 ext 305

jfradkin@wazagua.com
www.wazagua.com
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-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-admin-owner@postgresql.org
[mailto:pgsql-admin-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Tom Lane
Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2005 11:59 AM
To: Salem Berhanu
Cc: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org; pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] [GENERAL] postgres & server encodings

"Salem Berhanu" <salemb4@hotmail.com> writes:
> What exactly is the SQL_ASCII encoding in postgres?

SQL_ASCII isn't so much an encoding as the declaration that you don't
care about encodings.  That setting simply disables encoding validity
checks and encoding conversions.  The server will take any byte string
clients send it (barring only embedded zero bytes), and store and return
it unchanged.

Since it disables conversions, the notion of converting to another
encoding is pretty much meaningless :-(.

            regards, tom lane

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