Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 04:35:04PM +0200, Tim Tassonis wrote:
If specifying a characterset different from the default locale for a
database is such a bad idea, why is it possible at all?
It isn't possible, that's the point. What is possible is that client
can use any encoding they like to talk to the server, but the server
will store and manage it all in one. What locale C means "I'm an
encoding wizard and will ensure all my programs can handle all the
encodings I want to use, because I understand the database will treat
everything I send as ASCII bytes no matter what encoding the clients
say it is".
From how I understand you, if I wanted a postgres server machine
supporting databases with different charsets, I'm advised to initialise
one cluster per locale.
If you want to control the *storage* charset, yes. If you just want
clients to think it's a LATIN9 DB, doing a:
ALTER DATABASE foo SET client_encoding=latin9;
Ok, got it, it's really this setting that's interesting. If I have a
legacy application that defaults to latin1, I can leave the DB to UTF-8
,set the client_encoding to latin1 and then all my selects and inserts
can use latin1, but the data will be stored in utf-8.
Well, that's really all I need, sorry for the confusion.
Thanks a lot
Tim
