Advantages - if any of - of us ascii7 charset over ascii western european

From: Norman Dunbar <Norman.Dunbar_at_lfs.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 17:34:54 -0000
Message-ID: <E2F6A70FE45242488C865C3BC1245DA702F240F3@lnewton.leeds.lfs.co.uk>

Andrew,

we used to leave our databases at US7ASCII until we started importing dumps from German customers and suddenly we were getting duplicate keys in tables because there was German and English language text in some VARCHAR2 columns. Suffice to say that the accented characters were converted to unaccented, and somehow the codes managed to match up in the table.

We changed to using an 8 bit character set and all those problems vanished.

That's our main advantage - we don't have to worry about the fact we have customers all over Europe, Australia etc and can quite happily import test dumps from all over.

We might even go to UTF8 soon :o)

Cheers,
Norman.

Norman Dunbar
Database/Unix administrator
Lynx Financial Systems Ltd.
mailto:Norman.Dunbar_at_LFS.co.uk

Tel: 0113 289 6265
Fax: 0113 289 3146
URL: http://www.Lynx-FS.com


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-----Original Message-----
From: calbloke_at_yahoo.com (andrew) [mailto:calbloke_at_yahoo.com] Posted At: Tuesday, November 19, 2002 4:51 PM Posted To: server
Conversation: Advantages - if any of - of us ascii7 charset over ascii western european
Subject: Advantages - if any of - of us ascii7 charset over ascii western european

What , if any, is the advantage of defining a DB characterset as Ascii 7-bit (US Ascii) over Ascii 8-bit (western european) ?

Both require a single byte for storage but the 8-bit allows you to store umlauts etc correctly

Thanks Received on Tue Nov 19 2002 - 11:34:54 CST