In a context using normalization, wouldn't you typically want to store a normalized-text type that could perhaps (depending on locale) take advantage of simpler, more-efficient comparison functions? Whether you're doing INSERT/UPDATE, or importing a flat text file, if you canonicalize characters and substrings of identical meaning when trivial distinctions of encoding are irrelevant, you're better off later. User-invocable normalization functions by themselves don't make much sense. (If Postgres now supports binary- or mixed-binary-and-text flat files, perhaps for restore purposes, the same thing applies.)
David Hudson
