"Joel Fradkin" <jfradkin@wazagua.com> writes:
> It failed on French strings we had in the database (this was confusing as it
> had worked prior). After looking at it I isolated the issue to the encoding
> being Unicode (the odbc driver loads the data base when the data base is
> SQL_ASCII, but not when it is Unicode; I thought I would want Unicode).
That means that the data you have is not in Unicode, but some other
encoding (and no, I cannot tell what from this information). You can
load it into the database only by setting client_encoding to tell what
encoding the data is, so that the server can convert it to Unicode
correctly.
BTW, I believe that server_encoding = UNICODE doesn't currently work
well on Windows, due to inadequate support from the operating system.
So that could be contributing to your problems as well, if you're
trying to run the server on Windows.
If you don't know and don't care what encoding you're using, you're
best off to set server_encoding = SQL_ASCII; that is more or less meant
to describe that state of ignorance ;-)
regards, tom lane