encoding???

[Carol Walter <walterc(at)indiana(dot)edu>]

Greetings...

I'm really confused about something.  I hope you'll help.  I have a  
client who wants to use Asian Character data.  The database he wants  
to use is set to SQL_ASCII, the default.  I thought there might be an  
ALTER DATABASE command that would change this, but I've been through  
the documentation and it says that encoding is done at the client  
level and is changed with a set statement.  I assumed that would be  
like setting the search path so I tried it and I was able to set the  
encoding for my session to UTF8.  I guess my question is how does  
this work, where the database is set to use one encoding sequence and  
it is set for the client session to something else.

Carol Walter