Re: ENCODING (Unicode)

Dave Page wrote:

>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Reshat Sabiq [mailto:sabiq(at)purdue(dot)edu]
>>Sent: 20 May 2003 00:33
>>To: pgadmin-support(at)postgresql(dot)org
>>Subject: [pgadmin-support] ENCODING (Unicode)
>>
>>
>>To my surprise i recently found out that there is no
>>difference in what encoding a database or even initdb has.
>>I could insert and retrieve Unicode and extended ASCII with a
>>Java program, and everything is good. However, when the
>>values are displayed by pgadmin or a cygwin shell, both
>>extended ASCII and Unicode characters are shown as a sequence
>>of 2 characters, and those don't correspond to the bits one
>>would expect to have if 2 byte-characer were split into 2
>>1-byte (8-bit) characters. The best explanation i could come
>>up with is that pgAdminII is not supporting Unicode
>>encodings, and the shell obviously also does not. This is not
>>surprising, because most of pre-Java, pre-.NET apps were and
>>are like that, although Windows has the notions of wchar...
>>If i'm right, i wonder if Unicode is expected to be supported
>>sometimes in the future. And in general all feedback is appreciated.
>>
>>
>
>Hi,
>
>pgAdmin doesn't support Unicode as you say, primarily because Visual
>Basic doesn't either (at least not to any degree of usefulness). pgAdmin
>III will eventually support Unicode as it is being written in C++ with
>eventual support being catered for as much as possible.
>
>Regards, Dave.
>
>
Thanks. Glad to hear about pgAdminIII...
To follow up on this topic:
Given that i can insert and retrieve Unicode values into either ASCII-based or Unicode-based DB, is Unicode-based DB less efficient? I remember reading something about it a while ago. I don't see immediately why that would be the case though, because special characters are 2 bytes either way, assuming we are not simplifying Unicode characters into ASCII.

Sincerely,
Reshat.

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