Re: a "catch all" type ... such a thing?

Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> Are there any data types that can hold pretty much any type of
> character? UTF-16 isn't supported (or its missing from teh docs), and
> UTF-8 doesn't appear to have a big enough range ...

UTF-8 has exactly the same "range" as UTF-16.  In any case, the UTF-8 
encoding in PostgreSQL is probably your best choice, unless you want to 
dig into the weirdness that is MULE_INTERNAL.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/