Paul, did you still have some reservations about switching to ByteA
column types in PostgreSQL?

Aaron


On Thu, 2005-11-10 at 15:39 -0800, Robert Fleming wrote:
> Aaron Stone wrote:
> 
> >On Thu, 2005-11-10 at 13:26 -0800, Robert Fleming wrote:
> >
> >  
> >
> >>This has been discussed a couple times before.  I've tried to summarize 
> >>it here:
> >>
> >>http://www.dbmail.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=unicode_postgresql_database
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >Bug 218 had to do with problems with Unicode encoding prior to
> >PostgreSQL 8.1. But everything else sounds like it's to do with the very
> >nature of proper encodings in general. Is there still a version
> >dependent component to this issue?
> >  
> >
> I'm not sure that bug 218 was related to the Unicode fixes in PostgreSQL 
> 8.1 -- attempting to store an ISO 8859-1 string (with octets > 127) in a 
> UNICODE database would fail with all recent versions of PostgreSQL.  But 
> at the same time I can't make out what exactly happened for the bug 
> reporter.  His message was "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit", thus 
> /should/ not have had any octets outside the US-ASCII range -- thus 
> would be storable in a UNICODE db.
> 
> It seems to me that these are all the same problem: putting an invalid 
> UTF-8 sequence in a "text" field in a database with UNICODE encoding.  
> IMHO, the database should be asked to just store raw octets as they're 
> received from the Internet (as you mentioned, there are no guarantees 
> that received messages will not have encoding anomalies).   So asking 
> the database to do automatic encoding conversions via the "client 
> encoding" mechanism is just going to cause problems (would need to 
> guarantee perfect round-tripping of conversions, e.g. to preserve 
> digital signatures).
> 
> I would say that in general, this dbmail issue is not dependent on 
> PostgreSQL version because no recent PostgreSQL version would have 
> allowed illegal UTF-8 sequences in UNICODE databases.
> 
> Robert
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