I have a project in Delphi 7 that makes use of Firebird. I'm thinking of migrating this application to a Delphi XE * version.
However, we know that since Delphi 2009 the String pattern is Unicode and not ANSI anymore.
My Firebird database was created with ANSI standard, so much so that the system writes and reads data from the database without any character compatibility issues. By default Firebird uses WIN1252 as encode, which I believe to be similar or ANSI itself.
In projects with SQL Server and Entity Framework, we are advised not to use Unicode because it takes up more space. Okay, and we have no problem with that. It is then set to VARCHAR.
I think of getting the whole database schema and re-creating the database to a new standard, even though it's still in GDB even using Firebird 2.5, but not using a Unicode pattern in the text-type columns in the database? Use what type?
Because I do not want to have to treat the entire system to use the AnsiString type, but rather the String itself.
What would be the correct way to treat this situation?
Thankful