On Sun, Mar 02, 2008 at 11:50:01AM -0800, Swaminathan Saikumar <swami@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote a message of 30 lines which said: > Postgres has this encoding setting at the database level. Which is simpler, IMHO. "One encoding to rule them all" > I am using UTF8 Unicode for most of my data, but there is some data > that I know for sure will be ASCII. However, this is also stored as > UTF8, using up more space. Excuse me, but this shows a serious ignorance of UTF-8. A character of the ASCII range, in UTF-8, is stored in one byte, exactly the same size as ASCII (any ASCII file is an UTF-8 file, that's an important property of UTF-8). ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match