Re: Can ICU be used for a database's default sort order?

On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 11:32 AM, Peter Eisentraut
<peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> It's something I hope to address soon.

I hope you do. I think that we'd realize significant benefits by
having ICU become the defacto standard collation provider, that most
users get without even realizing it. As things stand, you have to make
a point of specifying an ICU collation as your per-column collation
within every CREATE TABLE. That's a significant barrier to adoption.

> 1) Associate by name only. That is, you can create a database with any
> COLLATION "foo" that you want, and it's only checked when you first
> connect to or do anything in the database.
>
> 2) Create shared collations. Then we'd need a way to manage having a
> mix of shared and non-shared collations around.
>
> There are significant pros and cons to all of these ideas. Some people
> I talked to appeared to prefer the shared collations approach.

I strongly prefer the second approach. The only downside that occurs
to me is that that approach requires more code. Is there something
that I've missed?

--
Peter Geoghegan