UTF8 with a default locale engine

Hello, I've searched the web and don't see any clear answer on this. Any advice would be appreciated. We have always used the default character set: ISO8859-1 Our developers now want to store UTF8 data within some of our existing tables. These are product tables that have been in use for many years, so there are many existing applications hitting them. But some of our product information is starting to come in with international characters, which we would like to preserve. So... is it possible to convert a table or column to UTF8?? Everything I have read seems to say that we have to create the instance, or database, entirely in UTF8. And then all apps must have their locale set to UTF8 in order to use that instance/database. Is this really the case? Thanks in advance!

Yes. The LOCALE is a database property. I'd say this is the general rule with other RDBMs but I may be wrong. If that was not the case, then the database would have to implement internal code conversions to resolve table joins and this could/would lead to situations where joins were made between codesets that were not compatible: SELECT .... FROM chinese_supplier c, european_buys e WHERE e.category = c.category I don't intend the above to make much sense, but the idea is you could end up comparing chinese characters with european characters (assume "e" was using ISO-8859-1 and "c" some chinese locale). This is the kind of problems Informix faces when users try to run distributed queries between databases with different locales. Regards. On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 8:52 PM, Nick <milesnmiles@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello, > > I've searched the web and don't see any clear answer on this. Any advice > would be appreciated. > > We have always used the default character set: ISO8859-1 > > Our developers now want to store UTF8 data within some of our existing > tables. These are product tables that have been in use for many years, so > there are many existing applications hitting them. But some of our product > information is starting to come in with international characters, which we > would like to preserve. > > So... is it possible to convert a table or column to UTF8?? > > Everything I have read seems to say that we have to create the instance, > or database, entirely in UTF8. And then all apps must have their locale > set to UTF8 in order to use that instance/database. Is this really the > case? > > Thanks in advance! > _______________________________________________ > Informix-list mailing list > Informix-list@iiug.org > http://www.iiug.org/mailman/listinfo/informix-list > -- Fernando Nunes Portugal http://informix-technology.blogspot.com My email works... but I don't check it frequently...