Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> writes:

> It would be good if someone with more knowledge of databases would chime
> in here.

I'm pretty fuzzy on the details, but postgresql can handle the concept
of varying encodings and converting on the fly, so that you can tell a
session that you want a particular encoding.  So if guile is set up to
have unicode always, then presumably the db->guile conversions should
just do that.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/multibyte.html