Re: [HACKERS] Refined LC_COLLATE or multiple database clusters?

On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 12:33:03PM +0200, Grega Bremec wrote:
>
> Collate order for those databases, however, needs to be different. Obviously,

[...]

> Is it possible to do either of these things that could solve this problem
> adequately:
>
> - somehow manage to make one postmaster run on top of two separate
> database clusters that would each have a different collate ordering
> scheme
>
> - use some other method of initializing one database from a different
> template and taking with it LC_COLLATE setting (I suppose not, as
> the "${PGDATA}/global/" directory is global to the cluster)
>
> - use a patch that would add such functionality or upgrade to a version
> (even if release-candidate, beta is not really an option, i gather)
> of PostgreSQL that supported it
>
> - in absence of any other viable solution, change the global setting of
> the database cluster without having to dump/reinitdb/restore it

If you do not need the collating sequence to affect index operations,
you can use nls_string function to sort using

order by nls_string(column, 'sl_SI.utf-8')

where any locale can be specified in the runtime. The nls_string
result can also be used to compare strings in collating manner, however,
indexes will not be used in that case, which may or may not be a
problem for your usage.

The source of nls_string with installation instructions can be found
at

http://www.fi.muni.cz/~adelton/l10n/

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Honza Pazdziora | adelton(at)fi(dot)muni(dot)cz | http://www.fi.muni.cz/~adelton/
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Only self-confident people can be simple.