on 1/31/04 9:18 AM, Eric Forget at forgete At cafederic .DOT com wrote:
> If I may add my grain of salt on this, I will go further: let the user of
> the database (us) choose. It could be for the whole database, i.e. not
> necessarily at field level. But as always the more flexibility the better...
>
> Here's why:
>
> UTF-8 takes 1 to 4 bytes
> UTF-16 takes 2 to 4 bytes
> UTF-32 takes 4 bytes
>
> Now imagine that you have a field where you allow the user to enter up to 64
> characters. Quiz: How much space you have to keep for the field in the
> database for each of the 3 encodings?
>
> Encoding For Americans For International
> -------- ------------- -----------------
>
> UTF-8 64 256
> UTF-16 128 256
> UTF-32 256 256
>
> So, as we can see, as soon as we develop a software for international, we
> need to keep 4 bytes per character anyway. The only difference will be where
> the blanks are put: at the end or in the middle of the string.
>
> However, for all comparisons UTF-32 will be faster since there is no
> conversion of the characters to be done. UTF-8 4 bytes character is more
> costly for comparisons than UTF-16 4 bytes character which is also more
> costly than UTF-32. Unfortunately, most of the Unicode implementations
> support only UTF-8 and UTF-16.
>
> So, for today the ideal is to use UTF-8 for Americans (or French, etc.) and
> use UTF-16 everywhere else.
Yes, Eric, we perfectly understand all this.
> Once, implementations will be added for UTF-32,
> it will become useful to switch to it. UTF-32 is the only native encoding.
> It has once been UTF-16 but it changed lately...
And we all must pay less attention then to size of db.
HDDs becomes faster and bigger.
CPUs faster.
BTW, Note OS X, Wndows, and I think Linux, all use UTF16 as native
> Since it is a new code base, why not start going with the flexibility...
--
Best regards,
Ruslan Zasukhin [ I feel the need...the need for speed ]
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