Re: 8.3 to 8.4 Upgrade issues

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 13:49, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Rod Taylor <rod(dot)taylor(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> Does anybody have experience on the cost, if any, of making this change?
>
>> Pg 8.3:
>> Encoding: SQL_ASCII
>> LC_COLLATE: en_US
>> LC_CTYPE: en_US
>
>> Pg 8.4:
>> Encoding: SQL_ASCII
>> Collation: en_US.UTF-8
>> Ctype: en_US.UTF-8
>
> Well, *both* of those settings collections are fundamentally
> wrong/bogus; any collation/ctype setting other than "C" is unsafe if
> you've got encoding set to SQL_ASCII.  But without knowing what your
> platform thinks "en_US" means, it's difficult to speculate about what
> the difference between them is.  I suppose that your libc's default
> assumption about encoding is not UTF-8, else these would be equivalent.
> If it had been assuming a single-byte encoding, then telling it UTF8
> instead could lead to a significant slowdown in strcoll() speed ...
> but I would think that would mainly be a problem if you had a lot of
> non-ASCII data, and if you did, you'd be having a lot of problems other
> than just performance.  Have you noticed any change in sorting behavior?

Agreed with it being an interesting choice of settings. Nearly all of
the data is 7-bit ASCII and what isn't seems to be a mix of UTF8,
LATIN1, and LATIN15.

I'm pretty sure it interpreted en_US to be LATIN1. There haven't been
any noticeable changes in sorting order that I know of.