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Hi All,
I recently had a sight problem with a
development database because I used the default encoding of SQL_ASCII. When I
tried to load the database into a EUC_JP database of course there were some
problems with invlaid EUC_JP characters. Fortunately they were easy to find and
fix.
Anyway, my search on "encoding" or
"multibyte" showed up nothing in the 7.4 documentation. Eventually I found
a page written by Tatsuo Ishii in the 7.2 documentation.
I think that it's an important area, and
is a potential trap for new players so I'd like to see the documentation
updated.
The following came out of a discussion
with Tom Lane. I submitted it as comment in the interactive documentation. I
think it would be a good idea to check the details and update the
doc:
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The default encoding SQL_ASCII effectively
disables any encoding conversion. This means that your db will accept any kind
of data. It's a potential problem as you may end up wth different kinds of
encoding being used in both your data and metadata.
It would seem that unless you specifically
require to store data in various encodings then you should select a
specific encoding when creating a new database. Use initdb -E to set the
default for all new DBs. This can be overridden when using creating a new
DB
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Also, the documentation for installation
(chapter 14), creating database clusters (16.2) and creating databases
(18.2) doesn't mention encoding at all. Maybe they should. Also 16.2
should link to the documention for initdb (Server Applications, section
III). I think that wuld be a good idea.
regards
Iain |
