Overall I liked the article and wasn't put off by the slightly confrontational style, but this comment threw me a bit:

You probably think I'm going to talk about very old character sets like EBCDIC here. Well, I won't. EBCDIC is not relevant to your life. We don't have to go that far back in time.

I was once chatting with an IBM pre-sales consultant who gave me the fact-oid that something like 80% of the data in the world live on mainframes in EBCDIC (VSAM?) files i.e. the vast majority of data is not in relational databases.

I must say that I am still suprised by this and not sure I believe it but the assertion that EBCDIC is dead and of no importance is, I think, flawed.

Regards,
Dom.