>> I have had a request to add multi-byte support to the Debian binary
>> packages of PostgreSQL.
>> Since I live in England, I have personally no need of this and therefore
>> have little understanding of the implications.
>> If I change the packages to use multi-byte support, (UNICODE (UTF-8) is
>> suggested as the default), will there be any detrimental effects on the
>> fairly large parts of the world that don't need it? Should I try to
>> provide two different packages, one with and one without MB support?
>
>Probably. The downside to having MB support is reduced performance and
>perhaps functionality. If you don't need it, don't build it...
Not really. I did the regression test with/without multi-byte enabled.
with MB: 2:53:92 elapsed
w/o MB: 2:52.92 elapsed
Perhaps the worst case for MB would be regex ops. If you do a lot of
regex queries, performance degration might not be neglectable.
Load module size:
with MB: 1208542
w/o MB: 1190925
(difference is 17KB)
Talking about the functionality, I don't see any missing feature with
MB comparing w/o MB. (there are some features only MB has. for
example, SET NAMES).
--
Tatsuo Ishii