Re: Patch for collation using ICU

Useful if it's going to support earlier releases of ICU....

Not all os's come with ICU3.2, debian for example, currently has 2.1 in
testing, and 2.6 in unstable.

... John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-hackers-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
> [mailto:pgsql-hackers-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of
> Palle Girgensohn
> Sent: Friday, March 25, 2005 10:40 AM
> To: pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: [HACKERS] Patch for collation using ICU
>
> Hi!
>
> I've put together a patch for using IBM's ICU package for collation.
>
> If your OS does not have full support for collation ur
> uppercase/lowercase in multibyte locales, this might be
> useful. If you are using a multibyte character encoding in
> your database and want collation, i.e. order by, and also
> lower(), upper() and initcap() to work properly, this patch
> will do just that.
>
> This patch is needed for FreeBSD, since this OS has no
> support for collation of for example unicode locales (that
> is, wcscoll(3) does not do what you expect if you set
> LC_ALL=sv_SE.UTF-8, for example). AFAIK the patch is *not*
> necessary for Linux, although IBM claims ICU collation to be
> about twice as fast as glibc for simple western locales.
>
> It adds a configure switch, `--with-icu', which will set up
> the code to use ICU instead of wchar_t and wcscoll.
>
> This has been tested only on FreeBSD-4.11 & FreeBSD-5-stable,
> where it seems to run well. I've not had the time to do any
> comparative performance tests yet, but it seems it is at
> least not slower than using LATIN1 with
> sv_SE.ISO8859-1 locale, perhaps even faster.
>
> I'd be delighted if some more experienced postgresql hackers
> would review this stuff. The patch is pretty compact, so it's
> fast reading :) I'm planning to add this patch as an option
> (tagged "experimental") to FreeBSD's postgresql port. Any
> ideas about whether this is a good idea or not?
>
> Any thoughts or ideas are welcome!
>
> Cheers,
> Palle
>
> Patch at:
> <http://people.freebsd.org/~girgen/postgresql-icu/pg-801-icu-2
005-03-14.diff>
>
> ICU at sourceforge: <http://icu.sf.net/>
>
>
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