Hi, Thomas, thank you for testing. It seems, despite the environment, we can expect some performance loss using fields with UTF8.
Btw, i also have a server with SSD (and RAID), and the performance of firebird compared to a regular HDD is amazing. Operations which takes minutes in a (forced-writes OFF) database in HDD takes seconds in a (forced-writes ON) database in SSD. Regards, Fabiano
