Jan Ploski <jpljpl@gmx.de> writes:
> It seems correct to me, so the question about Unicode's slowness remains.
> I guess that I will have a look at the driver's internals. Do you believe
> that the backend should not be much slower [than LATIN1] when delivering
> query results in the UNICODE encoding?
If no translation is happening then I can't see a reason for any
difference at all, given what you were doing.
I can imagine speed differences for operations that actually interpret
the character data --- for example, sorting on a text column --- but
AFAICT you weren't doing anything like that.
It'd be worth checking first to see whether the extra time is really
being spent in the backend, client, or both.
regards, tom lane