Re: New to PostgreSQL, performance considerations

[Michael Glaesemann <grzm(at)seespotcode(dot)net>]

On Dec 11, 2006, at 10:47 , Daniel van Ham Colchete wrote:

> I never understood what's the matter between the ASCII/ISO-8859-1/UTF8
> charsets to a database.

If what you mean by ASCII is SQL_ASCII, then there is at least one  
significant difference between UTF8 (the PostgreSQL encoding) and  
SQL_ASCII. AIUI, SQL_ASCII does no checking at all with respect to  
what bytes are going in, while UTF8 does make sure to the best of its  
ability that the bytes represent valid UTF-8 characters, throwing an  
error if an invalid byte sequence is detected.

There's more information regarding this here:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/interactive/ 
multibyte.html#MULTIBYTE-CHARSET-SUPPORTED

Michael Glaesemann
grzm seespotcode net