I didn't have proper knowledge about the UTF8 format, thanks. I originally meant nvarchar & nchar, which is basically varchar & char that supports Unicode regardless of the database encoding.
On 3/2/08, Tino Wildenhain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Swaminathan Saikumar wrote: > > I am familiar with MS Sql Server & just started using Postgres. > > For storing Unicode, Sql Server uses nvarchar/char for unicode, and uses > > char/varchar for ASCII. > > Postgres has this encoding setting at the database level. > > > > I am using UTF8 Unicode for most of my data, but there is some data that > > I know for sure will be ASCII. However, this is also stored as UTF8, > > using up more space. > > > This is wrong - ASCII is a subset of UTF8 and therefore uses > exactly one byte for every ASCII char. > > See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 for example. > > > > > > At first sight, it looks like the the more granular level design is > > better. Any comments? If you agree, does it make sense to add this as a > > new datatype to Postgres? > > > Which new datatype? > > Regards > > Tino > >