[RFC] Localized literals

Hi,

we have a customer who shot themselves in the foot by using
table names with german accented characters in them.
The client application on the popular OS is using a single-byte
encoding (LATIN9), their dump of the original database is using
the same but no "SET client_encoding = ..." line anywhere.
We didn't know the previous conditions and have setup the
default installed database cluster that was created during installation
on Debian 4.0. Obviously we have to re-initialize the cluster
with the original locale so the table names come out right after
reloading the dump.

But the question popped up whether PostgreSQL can be extended
to allow localized literals and apply encoding conversion the same
way as on string data. NAMEDATA can be replaced with regular TEXT
and have the same conversion everywhere. This way the relation and
field name limits are also eliminated. The conversion could be controlled
by a compile-time option and/or a GUC variable. Tell me if I am crazy.

Best regards,
Zoltán Böszörményi

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Zoltán Böszörményi
Cybertec Schönig & Schönig GmbH
http://www.postgresql.at/