Microsoft is very COM-based for its actual data access methods.... and COM
uses BSTRs that are BOM-less UTF-16. Because of that, the actual storage
format of any database ends up irrelevant since it will be converted to
UTF-16 anyway.
Given that this is what the data layers do, performance is certainly better
if there does not have to be an extra call to the Windows
MutliByteToWideChar to convert UTF-8 to UTF-16. So from a Windows
perspective, not only is it no trouble, but it also the best possible
solution!
In any case, I know plenty of web people who *do* encode their strings in
SQL Server databases as UTF-8 for web applications, since UTF-8 is their
preference. They are willing to take the hit of "converting themselves"
because when data is being read it is faster to go through no conversions at
all.
Michael
> ----------
> From: Joe_Ross@tivoli.com[SMTP:Joe_Ross@tivoli.com]
> Sent: Friday, June 23, 2000 7:55 AM
> To: Unicode List
> Cc: Unicode List; Hossein_Kushki%IBMCA@tivoli.com
> Subject: Re: Java, SQL, Unicode and Databases
>
>
>
> I think that this is also true for DB2 using UTF-8 as the database
> encoding.
> From an application perspective, MS SQL Server is the one that gives us
> the most
> trouble, because it doesn't support UTF-8 as a database encoding for char,
> etc.
> Joe
>
> Kenneth Whistler <kenw@sybase.com> on 06/22/2000 06:42:20 PM
>
> To: "Unicode List" <unicode@unicode.org>
> cc: unicode@unicode.org, kenw@sybase.com, mgm@sybase.com (bcc: Joe
> Ross/Tivoli
> Systems)
> Subject: Re: Java, SQL, Unicode and Databases
>
>
>
>
> Jianping responded:
>
> >
> > Tex,
> >
> > Oracle doesn't have special requirement for datatype in JDBC driver if
> you use
> UTF8 as database
> > character set. In this case, all the text datatype in JDBC will support
> Unicode data.
> >
>
> The same thing is, of course, true for Sybase databases using UTF-8
> at the database character set, accessing them through a JDBC driver.
>
> But I think Tex's question is aimed at the much murkier area
> of what the various database vendors' strategies are for dealing
> with UTF-16 Unicode as a datatype. In that area, the answers for
> what a cross-platform application vendor needs to do and for how
> JDBC drivers might abstract differences in database implementations
> are still unclear.
>
> --Ken
>
>
>
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