Re: basic questions: Postgres with yum on CentOS 5.1

On Tue, 01 Jan 2008, Chuck wrote:

> I'm not sure how to "make sure automatic updates are turned on" as
> Tometzky recommended. Is that a yum setting?

You need to install and configure "yum-updatesd" to perform automatic
updates for you. I don't use it so I don't know exactly how to do
this, but I believe it has a well documented configuration file in
/etc/.

> [root(at)vs191 ~]# service postgresql start
> Initializing database: [ OK ]
> When I listed the current databases, I found out that UTF-8 is not being used.

You did not set your /etc/sysconfig/i18n and reboot before you first
started, ignoring my recommendation. I'd delete /var/lib/pgsql/data
(if there's no data yet) and try again after this setting and reboot.

> I need to store multiple languages in my database such as English, French
>
> The end of the "21.2.2. Setting the Character Set" section says, "One way
> to use multiple encodings safely is to set the locale to C or POSIX during
> initdb, thus disabling any real locale awareness."

This is a very bad solution, as it would allow you to store any
garbage string in a database. It won't know letter boundaries, so any
text functions will misbehave badly. When your database encoding is
UTF-8 then you'll be forced to save consistant UTF-8 strings and
sorting, text functions, regular expressions etc... will work as
expected.

Regards
Tometzky
--
...although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a
moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you
were...
Winnie the Pooh