Re: Database Encoding

[Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>]

Aarni =?iso-8859-1?q?Ruuhim=E4ki?= <aarni(at)kymi(dot)com> writes:
> initdb -E LATIN1 ..., so one way to change it is to re-init.

> You can create databases with different encoding (from template1) with same 
> switch e.g. 

> createdb mydb -E UTF8 ...

Note that in most cases you can't just whack the encoding around without
paying attention to locale.  I believe the only locale that really works
with multiple encodings is "C" --- all the other ones assume a
particular encoding.  You'll get very odd and unpleasant results from
text sorting and functions like upper/lower if you have the database
locale and encoding set incompatibly.

Unfortunately we don't currently support changing locale on the fly ---
so you can only set it at initdb time.  So the -E switch to createdb
is a bit dangerous.

This stuff is covered in the docs at
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/static/charset.html

			regards, tom lane