Re: Reducing the overhead of NUMERIC data

In article <e692861c0511041149n6fe36345oba7c43d1d48bef3d@mail.gmail.com>,
Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com> writes:

> On 11/4/05, Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> wrote:
>> Yeah, and while one way of removing that dependance is to use ICU, that
>> library wants everything in UTF-16. So we replace "copying to add NULL
>> to string" with "converting UTF-8 to UTF-16 on each call. Ugh! The
>> argument for UTF-16 is that if you're using a language that doesn't use
>> ASCII at all, UTF-8 gets inefficient pretty quickly.

> Is this really the case? Only unicode values 000800 - 00FFFF are
> smaller in UTF-16 than in UTF-8, and in their case it's three bytes vs
> two. Cyrilic, Arabic, Greek, Latin, etc are all two bytes in both.

IMHO the best encoding for "Cyrilic, Arabic, Greek, Latin, etc" is
ISO-8859-* - just one byte. You need UTF* only when you want to have
more than one of of them in the same column.