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If the database uses UTF-8 encoding, can text from all human languages be properly stored and retrieved?
Are there any “gotchas” when dealing with non-English languages in a PostgreSQL database?
Working in Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL 9.1.
In addition to Spidey and Kevin’s points (use utf-8 in the client and an
ENCODING 'utf-8'database, beware of differing collations), I strongly recommend tagging each text field with the language it is in if at all possible.If you ever want to use full text search or any kind of linguistic analysis, it really helps to know which language each field is in. Full text search can’t do root-word analysis etc unless it has a dictionary and suffix list for the text being indexed – and for that it needs to know the language.
Storing ISO 639 language codes is probably a reasonable choice.