Re: locale and encoding advice

On Thu, Aug 03, 2006 at 03:48:21PM -0700, Reece Hart wrote:
>
> Does anybody know of an idiot's guide to the ins and outs of
> selecting database encoding? I remember reading on pgsql mailing
> lists about gotchas when using some choices of locales or
> encodings with some postgresql features. I recall that someone --
> David Fetter, I think -- wrote something disparaging about
> SQL_ASCII.

*blush*

That was me. What I wrote was that SQL_ASCII accepts any stream of
bytes which doesn't contain the nul byte (\0) which means it's likely
to accrue garbage. It's still true.

> My needs are simple: modern linux (suse 10), x86_64, pg 8.1.4,
> mostly American English, occasional use of tsearch2. I don't
> understand the tradeoffs between C, SQL_ASCII, UTF8, or any of the
> other possibilities. Any recommendations? I'm in SQL_ASCII now,
> but I'm about to rebuild and this is a good time to reconsider.

I'd go with a C locale and a UTF8 encoding. The downside of this is
that you may have some trouble importing your old data.

Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666
Skype: davidfetter

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