Character Encoding Confusion

Hi!

We've been using PostgreSQL (currently 7.4) via ODBC with ColdFusion
until now and didn't experience any problems. But now we want to move
from ColdFusion 4.5 to ColdFusion MX, thus abandoning ODBC and migrating
to JDBC.

As ODBC seems to be blissfully unaware of any character encodings
whatsoever, so were we - our databases are encoded in SQL_ASCII,
although we have stored german special chars (ÄÖÜäöü and ß), and from
what I have read so far, these are stored as multibyte and thus exceed
the SQL-ASCII specification.

With ODBC we never noticed the mistake we'd made. Now with
JDBC/ColdFusion MX 6.1, we see all sorts of weird characters on our
web-application, but not the ones which are stored in the database.

I tried setting different character sets for the JDBC-driver, using the
URL-syntax
jdbc:postgresql://123.456.789.012:5432/database?charSet=characterSet
with charSet=iso-8859-1 or charSet=UTF-8 for example, but that just
change anything.

Now is there some way to elegantly resolve the issue without dropping
and recreating the databases in order to change the encoding? Can we
somehow get the JDBC-driver to act just as the ODBC-driver did -
silently passing on the "bad" characters without changing anything?

And if there is just no way to avoid that, what's the correct procedure
for changing the encoding anyway? How would I be able to migrate the
current data without any data-loss and with the least possible downtime?

Kind regards

Markus