> > Don't forget that 128 is for *bytes*, not for characters(this is still
> > ture with 7.3). In CJK(Chinese, Japanese and Korean) single character
> > can eat up to 3 bytes if the encoding is UTF-8.
>
> True, but in those languages a typical name would be many fewer
> characters than it is in Western alphabets, no? I'd guess (with
> no evidence though) that the effect would more or less cancel out.
That's only true for "kanji" characters. There are alphabet like
phonogram characters called "katakana" and "hiragana". The former is
often used to express things imported from foreign languages (That
means Japanse has more and more things expressed in katakana than
before). Since they are phonogram, they tend to be longer
characters. For example, if I would like to have "object id" column
and want to name it using "katakana", it would be around 8 characters,
that is 24 bytes in UTF-8 encoding.
I'm not sure if Chinese or Korean has similar things though.
--
Tatsuo Ishii