I originally meant nvarchar & nchar, which is basically varchar & char that supports Unicode regardless of the database encoding.
On 3/2/08, Tino Wildenhain <tino@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Swaminathan Saikumar wrote:
> I am familiar with MS Sql Server & just started using Postgres.
> For storing Unicode, Sql Server uses nvarchar/char for unicode, and uses
> char/varchar for ASCII.
> Postgres has this encoding setting at the database level.
>
> 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.
This is wrong - ASCII is a subset of UTF8 and therefore uses
exactly one byte for every ASCII char.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 for example.
>
> At first sight, it looks like the the more granular level design is
> better. Any comments? If you agree, does it make sense to add this as a
> new datatype to Postgres?
Which new datatype?
Regards
Tino
