mjustin in his question 1 and question 2 says that TWideStringField.Size property for UTF8 fields in Delphi 2009 dbExpress is 4 times larger than the logical field size (max number of characters in the field). I inclined to consider this a dbExpress bug. That is what Delphi 2009 Help says:

The interpretation of Size depends on the data type. The meaning of Size for data types that use it is given in the following table. For all other data types, Size is not used and its value is always 0.

ftString - Size is the maximum number of characters in the string.

I am using FibPlus 6.9.9 and it follows the above documentation - the string field size is the maximum number of characters, not bytes.

So the question also implies the following question:

Are DbExpress drivers in Delphi 2009 unusable for unicode databases?