Server Encoding and Client Encoding
Learn what is available for encoding in PostgreSQL.
We'll cover the following...
Encoding
An encoding is a particular representation of characters in bits and bytes. In the ASCII encoding, the letter A is encoded as the 7-bits byte 1000001, 65 in decimal, or 41 in hexadecimal. All those numbers are going to be written the same way on disk, and the letter A too.
Database encoding
The SQL_ASCII encoding is a trap we need to avoid falling into. To know which encoding our database is using, run the psql command \l. Type the following command after logging in to the database to see the output.
\l
The encoding here is UTF-8, which is the best choice these days, and we can see that the collation and ctype are English based in the UTF-8 encoding, which is good for our installation. We can, of course, pick ...