Re: default locale considered harmful? (was Re: [GENERAL]

Tom Lane writes:

> I recall someone floating a proposal that initdb should by default
> initialize the database in C locale, not whatever-it-finds-in-the-
> environment. To get a non-C locale you'd have to give an explicit
> command-line switch --- essentially, reversing the sense of the present
> "initdb --no-locale" option.

If you're concerned about speed, let's think about fixing the real
problems, not about disabling the feature altogether. A while ago I
proposed an easy solution that made LIKE use an index based on strxfrm
order instead. It was rejected on the grounds that it would prevent a
future enhancement of the LIKE mechanism to use the locale-enabled
collation order, but no one seems to be seriously interested in
implementing that. I still have the patch; we can reconsider it if you
like.

(Btw., LIKE using the locale-enabled collation sequence is hardly going to
work, because most locales compare strings backwards from the end to the
start in the second pass, so something like LIKE 'foo%' can easily give
inconsistent results, since you don't know what the end of the string
really is. It's better to think of pattern matching as
character-by-character matching.)

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net