Re: SQL_ASCII vs. 7-bit ASCII encodings

On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 01:15:36AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:

> We are currently seeing a whole lot of complaints due to the fact that
> 8.0 tends to default to Unicode encoding in environments where previous
> versions defaulted to SQL-ASCII.  That says to me that a whole lot of
> people were getting along just fine in SQL-ASCII, and therefore that
> moving further away from that behavior is the wrong thing.  In
> particular, there is not any single one of those complainants who would
> be happier with a 7-bit-only default; if they were using 7-bit-only
> data, they'd not have noticed a problem anyway.

I disagree.  Of course none of the complainants would be happy with
7-bit encoding, but if they had noticed they had a problem before they
had inserted millions of tuples, they could have corrected their
configuration right away.

The problem is that a single application coming from a single
environment is happy with a 8-bit-unchecked encoding, but as soon as
they develop a second application using a different environment, which
uses a different encoding, they start seeing invalid data pop up.  And
then they have a problem, because they have to dump all data, recode it,
and reimport it.  And that's very painful.

-- 
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]surnet.cl>)
Voy a acabar con todos los humanos / con los humanos yo acabaré
voy a acabar con todos / con todos los humanos acabaré (Bender)