zengun

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2005 02 15

RDBMS from Hell

Bad luck is:

  1. seeing Firefox suddenly decide to send a form’s content as UTF-8 when it has always sent it as ISO8859-1 (the target database’s encoding),
  2. seeing the UTF-8 version of ô is ô when seen as ISO8859-1,
  3. finding out MSSQL Server 6.5 chokes on ´ when you try to update the field to remove the offending double byte text,
  4. wondering just why the previous text appears in the SQL query at all,
  5. realising you have no control over neither the remote SQL Server nor the scripts that process the form (it’s f***ing bytecode in there!).

Suffice to say that I’m tempted to hack the server, provoke a crash or something, and then sell a solution based on free software. It’s just too bloody frustrating to work with antiquated proprietary shit.