Re: SQL_ASCII vs. 7-bit ASCII encodings

Oliver Jowett <oliver@opencloud.com> writes:
> Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>> That would cripple a system that many users are perfectly content with now.

> Well, I wasn't thinking of using a 7-bit encoding always, just as a
> replacement for the cases where we currently choose SQL_ASCII. Does that
> sound reasonable?

I agree with what (I think) Peter is saying: that would break things for
many people for whom the default works fine now.

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.
        regards, tom lane