I don't program in unicode and cannot fathom why anyone would want to do it in SQL (other languages sure, especially if you are Chinese or Russian or such), but that is besides the point, I don't mind SQLite being able to interpret certain unicode characters to fulfill it's query planning. Should be fairly easy to do too, SQLite already only talks UTF8. I DO however mind if it spends even a few CPU cycles on having to do that, or even check for it, because I care about speed and SQL isn't like normal programming where the compiler takes a couple milliseconds more to do it and you only compile once in a while. SQLite (and SQL engines in general) have to parse and interpret each of the thousands of queries we send them per second, and paying extra cycles for that really matters. I am quite curious though: - Is this possible in any other SQL engines? - Does the SQL standard have any guidelines in this regard?