Comments on: Waiting for 8.4 – database-level lc_collation and lc_ctype

By: Troy

Troy — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 03:06:02 +0000

I used pg_collkey to get around collation order in 8.1.x, however since we are using 8.3 now this does not work anymore.

ORDER BY collkey(field,locale) ;

is there any other way currently in 8.3 or 8.4 i can achieve this?

By: Vadym

Vadym — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:50:37 +0000

Really interesting. Too bad ms sql server does not provide ability to have more than one collation on the instance because of tempdb usage… for those who are interested in how it works in sql server see
http://db-staff.com/index.php/microsoft-sql-server/69-change-collation

By: Kari

Kari — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:43:17 +0000

Finally!! I have been waiting for this for several years. Running several parallel postgres instances is quite .. inconvenient.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:35:58 +0000

great new feature! i’ve been looking forward to have dbs with different collates on the same server!

By: depesz

depesz — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 07:55:58 +0000

@Steve:
to make it fully functional I would need to supply colation/ctype on much smaller objects than databases: tables or columns.

for example – consider sorting texts in many languages. of course – you can get away with it using simply utf8 everywhere, but that introduces additional costs of text conversion if your output charset is different.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 04:43:40 +0000

This is so awesome! Thanks for the continued updates on 8.4.

You mention “this is stil la long way to make PostgreSQL fully functional in multi-language environments”. Could you probably post where it is currently lacking multi-language support or potentially cause problems?

Thanks!