Re: Reducing the overhead of NUMERIC data

On 2005-11-03, Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org> wrote:
>> For "other databases", the column could be encoded as 2 byte characters
>> or 4 byte characters, allowing it to be fixed. I find myself doubting
>> that ASCII characters could be encoded more efficiently in such formats,
>> than the inclusion of a length header and per character length encoding,
>> but for multibyte characters, the race is probably even. :-)
>
> That's called UTF-16 and is currently not supported by PostgreSQL at
> all. That may change, since the locale library ICU requires UTF-16 for
> everything.

Even UTF-16 is not fixed-length; some characters require 4 bytes, not 2.

--
Andrew, Supernews
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