encoding

I am not clear on what makes this work?

I am going live Sunday and have thus far been using SQL_ASCHII.

I still have the feeling I should be using something else, but when I used
Unicode my conversion from MSSQL blew up on encoding error for a char that
wasn't plain ASCHII(IE French or Spanish etc.).

The conversion program ran fine when I chose SQL_ASCHII.

The data is on a windows 2k MSSQL database.

The conversion program is a .net app that reads from MSSQL win2k data base
and writes to postgtres 8.0.2 on Redhat AS4.

I tried to get this to work a while back and found if I set the encoding
explicitly on the connect in the .net connector it did not give me an error,
but I still have many asp pages and I could not get the encoding set using
the ODBC (which is what the asp pages use).

I believe I tried setting it with a sql statement, but that did not seem to
help either.

I can move forward using SQL_ASCHII, but would prefer to have encoding set
properly, but I ma not sure what I am missing.

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

Joel Fradkin