Re: Why do indexes and sorts use the database collation?

On Tue, 2023-11-14 at 14:47 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Why should that ever be different from the column's own declared
> collation?

Because an index with the "C" collation is more efficient in terms of
building/maintaining/searching the index, and it also doesn't carry
risks of corrupting your PK index when you upgrade libc or other
dependency headaches.

A "C" collation index is also perfectly capable of performing the
duties of a PK index: equality means the exact same thing in every
deterministic collation, so it can enforce the same notion of
uniqueness. It can also be used for ordinary equality lookups in the
same way, though currently our planner doesn't do that (I'll take a
shot at fixing that).

Of course such an index won't offer range scans or pathkeys useful for
ORDER BY on that text column. But as I've argued elsewhere in this
thread, that's less useful than it may seem at first (text indexes are
often uncorrelated). It seems valid to offer this as a trade-off that
users can make.

Regards,
Jeff Davis