Delphi dbExpress and Interbase: UTF8 migration steps and risks?

Question

Currently, our database uses Win1252 as the only character encoding. We will have to support Unicode in the database tables soon, which means we have to perform this migrati

Answer 1

Problem: exporting metadata and table data for a WIN1252 database will create a CP1252 encoded file, but for the import, a UTF8 file is required (tested with IBExpert)

Symptom: errors in the script import to InterBase

Solution: use iconv to convert the script file to UTF8

Answer 2

Problem: CHAR fields no longer work and have to be replaced with VARCHAR.

Symptom: SELECT queries on a column which now uses UTF8 and is imported from WIN1252 with ASCII values no longer returns any value. Maybe this is a bug which I should report in QC.

Solution: replace all occurences of CHAR( in the database metadata DDL script with VARCHAR(