Message-ID: <4E422305.6070404@ringerc.id.au>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2011 14:19:49 +0800
From: Craig Ringer <ringerc@ringerc.id.au>
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To: pgsql.admin@googlegroups.com
CC: RBharathi <rajeshwarbharathi@gmail.com>, pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Character set equivalent for AL32UTF8
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On 2/08/2011 8:52 PM, RBharathi wrote:
> Hi,
> We plan to migrate data from Oracle 11g with characterset AL32UTF8 to a Postgres db.
>
> What is the euivalent charecterset to use in Postgress. We see only the UTF-8 option.

What's AL32UTF8 ? That's not a standard charset name or widely 
recognised charset. Is it some Oracle specific feature? If so, what 
makes it different to UTF-8 and why do you need it?

Documentation link? References?

A 30-second Google search turned up this:

http://decipherinfosys.wordpress.com/2007/01/28/difference-between-utf8-and-al32utf8-character-sets-in-oracle/

"As far as these two character sets go in Oracle,  the only difference 
between AL32UTF8 and UTF8 character sets is that AL32UTF8 stores 
characters beyond U+FFFF as four bytes (exactly as Unicode defines 
UTF-8). Oracle’s “UTF8” stores these characters as a sequence of two 
UTF-16 surrogate characters encoded using UTF-8 (or six bytes per 
character).  Besides this storage difference, another difference is 
better support for supplementary characters in AL32UTF8 character set."


Is this what you're taking about? If so, what's the concern? Have you 
checked to see if PostgreSQL's behavior fits your needs?


--
Craig Ringer