FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

>Ironically, the users who have the most problems with Unicode in general
>(CJK users, due to incompatibilities with other national encodings) are
>also the ones most maligned by UCS2 in particular -- but this is not a
>problem FreeTDS can solve unless we started pushing UTF-16 data into the
>database instead of UCS2, thus breaking compatibility with all Windows
>client software.

Steve, 

Not just "Windows client software".  The server side, too.  

Microsoft stores textual data in two forms:  Ascii as char and Unicode
(UCS2) as nchar data types.  It collates both and pretty much allows
char/nchar to be used interchangeably.  The only way to store UTF-16 data on
the server would be either as some kind of blob, or by lying: pretending to
the server that our varchar field, say, has ascii when in fact it has
UTF-16.  Such fields could be used in joins (to others like them), but
there's no way to fashion a "where" clause in the native SQL to search them,
and no (meaningful) way to sort them.  No tool could display them legibly,
either.  

At the very least, it'd be extremely inconvenient to use.  

BTW, do you know of any database, free or proprietary, that understands
anything besides Ascii and UCS2?  AFAIK, no one does and no one's trying.  

Regards, 

--jkl