encoding???

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