mtillman-921105 (1/30/2012)
Well, if they're not already doing so, I hope that new programming languages start using another delimiter for strings other than quotes. Even brackets "[]" would have been better characters to use, at least for English, since those characters aren't normally necessary.
1) The best delimiter for separating units of ASCII data is the Unit Separator, ASCII 31 (0x1F). Record Separator is ASCII 30 (0x1E), Group Separator is ASCII 29 (0x1D), and File Separator is ASCII 29 (0x1C); these have been defined since ASCII was defined in the early 1960's, though it's fallen out of use.
2) Delimiters shouldn't be relevant if you have good field to field mappings between app and database; regrettably, some of us don't have that luxury.
In response to the original post, as everyone else said, it's the app's problem; the database is there to take exactly what it's given, whether it's a Q, a š, a ©, or an ', and return that upon request.
As far as CPU hit, with current hardware, in general, properly escaping each character in a string is not likely to cost more CPU than checking on the database connection and authentication, formatting the data for the connection type, transmitting the data, getting a result, validating the result, and other database connection overhead tasks.