Re: Multibyte encoding vs. SQL_ASCII vs. locales and European languages

On Tue, Jan 29, 2002 at 10:56:37AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Frank Joerdens <frank(at)joerdens(dot)de> writes:
> > Multibyte support is mainly recommended for character sets that don't
> > fit into a single byte (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), and locale support
> > is said to be mostly sufficient for European languages . . . what escapes
> > me is why I should bother with either of these when SQL_ASCII works just
> > fine with my mostly German users. I must be missing something, right?
>
> Sort ordering of non-7-bit-ASCII characters? upper/lower case
> conversions that work as expected? locale-aware formatting options
> in to_char and friends?

Hm, yes. I overlooked that - and it *would* be useful (though no one's
complained so far that their entries beginning with an umlaut don't
appear in the list a the appropriate place, which is presumably partly
due to the fact that not that many German words or names have an umlaut
as their first character).

>
> If you don't need any of that, then you won't need locale support.
>
> I agree that you have no use for multibyte support.

What about the performance penalty that you're warned about with
locales (in the admin guide)? Does multibyte support entail the same
penalty? If not, then multibyte encoding, providing a superset of the
locale functionality (correct?), would be better than locales, right?

Regards, Frank