Re: New to PostgreSQL, performance considerations

On Dec 11, 2006, at 10:47 , Daniel van Ham Colchete wrote:

> I never understood what's the matter between the ASCII/ISO-8859-1/UTF8
> charsets to a database.

If what you mean by ASCII is SQL_ASCII, then there is at least one
significant difference between UTF8 (the PostgreSQL encoding) and
SQL_ASCII. AIUI, SQL_ASCII does no checking at all with respect to
what bytes are going in, while UTF8 does make sure to the best of its
ability that the bytes represent valid UTF-8 characters, throwing an
error if an invalid byte sequence is detected.

There's more information regarding this here:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/interactive/
multibyte.html#MULTIBYTE-CHARSET-SUPPORTED

Michael Glaesemann
grzm seespotcode net