> Unfortunately the implementation of UTF-8 in Firebird is annoying > because it reduces that maximum allowed number of characters to a 1/4 of > that for single byte character sets making it necessary to switch to > blobs sooner.
IIRC, old Interbase versions defined maximum Varchar length in *bytes*, which led to situation that *some* utf-8(then fss) strings could cause runtime error when storing them. To avoid this, later versions grant that *all* possible strings can be stored without raising error. It is done by limiting maximum declared length of varchar to accomodate the worst case = as if all characters in the string are 4 bytes (utf-8) or 3 bytes (fss). I think quite a lot of applications do not need such strong limit. E.g. application that I work on now is so depending on czech environment (laws, data suppliers, etc.) that it could never ever use more than 2 byte utf-8 character. I think it could be useful to allow to define own bytes/character constant for computing maximum varchar length (RDB$CHARACTER_SETS.RDB$BYTES_PER_CHARACTER) Ivan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn the latest--Visual Studio 2012, SharePoint 2013, SQL 2012, more! Discover the easy way to master current and previous Microsoft technologies and advance your career. Get an incredible 1,500+ hours of step-by-step tutorial videos with LearnDevNow. Subscribe today and save! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=58040911&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk Firebird-Devel mailing list, web interface at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/firebird-devel
