RE: Oracle 8i - the space wasting pig

Yes, this is the evil downside of UTF8. There are other charactersets that are variable width, i.e., they use 1 byte for the standard characters and 2 bytes for everything else. There's some pretty good documentation on MetaLink about it.

Of course, disk space is cheap nowadays, so why worry about it? :>)

--Walt Weaver
  Bozeman, Montana, USA

-----Original Message-----
From: root_at_fatcity.com [mailto:root_at_fatcity.com]On Behalf Of Andreas Jung
Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2000 6:28 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Re: Oracle 8i - the space wasting pig

On Tue, May 30, 2000 at 01:59:34PM -0800, John Barron wrote:
> UTF8 default is 2 bytes as it allows for all NLS char sets to be stored
> including japanese etc. I dont think you can change it.

This is what I mean "space wasting". There is no need store *every* character of
a string to be stored in 2 bytes. This is a really problem. Why should I need 20GB of disks to store just 10 GB of data that contains very few 2 byte characters like german umlauts....

Andreas

--
Author: Andreas Jung
  INET: ajung_at_sz-sb.de

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