Not that I am an expert or anything, but my initial data base was SQLASCII and I did have to convert it to Unicode. My reasons were we store French characters in our database and the newer odbc driver was not displaying them correctly coming from SQLASCII, but was from UNICODE. I also think that it can affect functions like length and upper, but Tom knows a ton more then me about this stuff. I did my initial conversion on 7.4 and the odbc driver at that time had no issues with SQLASCII displaying the French, but I think in 8.0.1 I started seeing an issue. The latest version of the driver 8.0.4 seems to be working well (only up a little over 24 hours thus far). I wish I had used a unicode data base from the start (7.4 driver was what I used and it did not like moving from MSSQL to Unicode). I later switched to .net (npgsql objects) for my conversion and used a encoding object to write the data correctly. Joel Fradkin Wazagua, Inc. 2520 Trailmate Dr Sarasota, Florida 34243 Tel. 941-753-7111 ext 305 jfradkin@xxxxxxxxxxx www.wazagua.com Powered by Wazagua Providing you with the latest Web-based technology & advanced tools. C 2004. WAZAGUA, Inc. All rights reserved. WAZAGUA, Inc This email message is for the use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and delete and destroy all copies of the original message, including attachments. -----Original Message----- From: pgsql-admin-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pgsql-admin-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tom Lane Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2005 11:59 AM To: Salem Berhanu Cc: pgsql-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx; pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: [ADMIN] postgres & server encodings "Salem Berhanu" <salemb4@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > What exactly is the SQL_ASCII encoding in postgres? SQL_ASCII isn't so much an encoding as the declaration that you don't care about encodings. That setting simply disables encoding validity checks and encoding conversions. The server will take any byte string clients send it (barring only embedded zero bytes), and store and return it unchanged. Since it disables conversions, the notion of converting to another encoding is pretty much meaningless :-(. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq
