Re: Character set equivalent for AL32UTF8

On 2/08/2011 8:52 PM, RBharathi wrote:
> Hi,
> We plan to migrate data from Oracle 11g with characterset AL32UTF8 to a Postgres db.
>
> What is the euivalent charecterset to use in Postgress. We see only the UTF-8 option.

What's AL32UTF8 ? That's not a standard charset name or widely
recognised charset. Is it some Oracle specific feature? If so, what
makes it different to UTF-8 and why do you need it?

Documentation link? References?

A 30-second Google search turned up this:

http://decipherinfosys.wordpress.com/2007/01/28/difference-between-utf8-and-al32utf8-character-sets-in-oracle/

"As far as these two character sets go in Oracle, the only difference
between AL32UTF8 and UTF8 character sets is that AL32UTF8 stores
characters beyond U+FFFF as four bytes (exactly as Unicode defines
UTF-8). Oracle’s “UTF8” stores these characters as a sequence of two
UTF-16 surrogate characters encoded using UTF-8 (or six bytes per
character). Besides this storage difference, another difference is
better support for supplementary characters in AL32UTF8 character set."

Is this what you're taking about? If so, what's the concern? Have you
checked to see if PostgreSQL's behavior fits your needs?

--
Craig Ringer