Обсуждение: Re: Retiring some encodings?

>> On 23 May 2025, at 11:08, wenhui qiu <qiuwenhuifx@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> HI 
>> > The obvious question is how many people would suffer because
>> > of that removal, as it would prevent them from using pg_upgrade.
>> 
>> > Can anybody who works in a region that uses these encodings make
>> > an educated guess?
>> +1 Agree ,GB18030 A coding standard in China, if deleted, will have an impact on the application of postgresql in
China,and China is now experiencing more and more hot postgresql heat, need to consider carefully!
 
> 
> Thanks for the input, that's exactly what we need to make informed decisions.
> How prevalent is GB18030 usage, is it used in all postgres installations in
> China, most of them or in some particular cases?

Another point is, whether other DBMS support GB18030 or not. If they
support, but PostgreSQL would not in the future, that could be a
reason to move away from PostgreSQL.

As far as I know MySQL, Oracle and SQL server support GB18030.

Best regards,
--
Tatsuo Ishii
SRA OSS K.K.
English: http://www.sraoss.co.jp/index_en/
Japanese:http://www.sraoss.co.jp

On Fri, May 23, 2025 at 07:58:46PM +0900, Tatsuo Ishii wrote:
> Another point is, whether other DBMS support GB18030 or not. If they
> support, but PostgreSQL would not in the future, that could be a
> reason to move away from PostgreSQL.

Yeah, that's a good point.  I would also question what's the benefit
in using GB18030 over UTF-8, though.  An obvious one I can see is
because legacy applications never get updated.

On my side, I'll try to grab some actual numbers or at least a trend
of them.
--
Michael

> Yeah, that's a good point.  I would also question what's the benefit
> in using GB18030 over UTF-8, though.  An obvious one I can see is
> because legacy applications never get updated.

Plus users have too many GB18030 encoded files, I guess.
--
Tatsuo Ishii
SRA OSS K.K.
English: http://www.sraoss.co.jp/index_en/
Japanese:http://www.sraoss.co.jp

Hi Michael

Yeah, that's a good point.  I would also question what's the benefit
in using GB18030 over UTF-8, though.  An obvious one I can see is
because legacy applications never get updated.

The GB18030 encoding standard is a mandatory Chinese character encoding standard required by regulations. Software sold and used in China must support GB18030, with its latest version being the 2023 edition. The primary advantage of GB18030 is that most Chinese characters require only 2 bytes for storage, whereas UTF-8 necessitates 3 bytes for the same characters. This makes GB18030 significantly more storage-efficient compared to UTF-8 in terms of space utilization.

Tony

Hi Michael

Yeah, that's a good point.  I would also question what's the benefit
in using GB18030 over UTF-8, though.  An obvious one I can see is
because legacy applications never get updated.

The GB18030 encoding standard is a mandatory Chinese character encoding standard required by regulations. Software sold and used in China must support GB18030, with its latest version being the 2023 edition. The primary advantage of GB18030 is that most Chinese characters require only 2 bytes for storage, whereas UTF-8 necessitates 3 bytes for the same characters. This makes GB18030 significantly more storage-efficient compared to UTF-8 in terms of space utilization.

Given this, removing it seems like a non-starter.

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com