PostgreSQL Administrator's Guide
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Locale Support

NOTE: Written by Oleg Bartunov. See Oleg's web page for additional information on locale and Russian language support.

While doing a project for a company in Moscow, Russia, I encountered the problem that postgresql had no support of national alphabets. After looking for possible workarounds I decided to develop support of locale myself. I'm not a C-programer but already had some experience with locale programming when I work with perl (debugging) and glimpse. After several days of digging through the Postgres source tree I made very minor corections to src/backend/utils/adt/varlena.c and src/backend/main/main.c and got what I needed! I did support only for LC_CTYPE and LC_COLLATE, but later LC_MONETARY was added by others. I got many messages from people about this patch so I decided to send it to developers and (to my surprise) it was incorporated into postgresql distribution.

People often complain that locale doesn't work for them. There are several common mistakes:

What are the Benefits?

You can use ~* and order by operators for strings contain characters from national alphabets. Non-english users definitely need that. If you won't use locale stuff just undefine USE_LOCALE variable.

What are the Drawbacks?

There is one evident drawback of using locale - it's speed ! So, use locale only if you really need it.


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