Re: [pgsql-packagers] Palle Girgensohn's ICU patch

> 26 nov 2014 kl. 10:36 skrev Jakob Egger <jakob(at)eggerapps(dot)at>:
>
>> One of the
>> big arguments against bringing it in then (because it worked) was that
>> we'd bring in another compile time dependency that's actually larger
>> than PostgreSQL itself.
>
> Magnus: I don't see how this is a problem as long as using ICU is *optional*. On systems with a working strcoll there is no problem with using the stdc functions (except that ICU might offer more collations).
>

In windows, it was primarily about packaging, I believe. Mind you, this was many years ago... ;)

>
>> Jakob, including the patch in PostgreSQL.app seems pretty reasonable. There's is only a small fraction of ICU that is used, a couple of libraries I believe.
>
> Palle: The ICU libraries themselves aren't that big, but the required data files (also packaged as a dynamic library) are big (around 25MB uncompressed). However, I'd rather increase the download size by 30% than ship a broken database.

Bear in mind that this might alter the way indexes are built. From the top of my head, I just can't remember if this is true or not. I'm probably wrong? Magnus? You would have to try.

It does change the order by to properly handle utf-8 *AND* order by becomes case insensitve. I'm not sure this is correct SQL? I know that in Oracle, this is optional (NLS_COMP=LINGUISTIC and/or NLS_SORT=BINARY_CI), and SQL Server has something similar.