On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Stephan Szabo wrote:
The locale settings depend on LC_* at initdb time only. When the postmaster starts it sets the locale based on the stored values from initdb, not on the current environment.
With an SQL_ASCII database being accessed from a client with
client_encoding set to SQL_ASCII (which it should be if you aren't setting
it) the byte values of a string are passed along with no conversion for
the encoding. This means that from within one environment you should get
back what you put in, so it might *look* like it's KOI8-R if that's what
you're in, but it's not because someone accessing it from say an ISO8859-1
system may see something different.
As a result, the possibility to control encodings and locales looks as follows:
initdb createdb psql Encoding: Y Y Y Locale: Y N N
It seems that more natural scheme will be
initdb createdb psql Encoding: Y Y Y Locale: Y Y Y
Now the possibility to use different encodings for createdb and psql is a bit strange... Also, it is impossible to have different locales for different databases within one cluster, and it is impossible to use different locales with one database. The latter is even more critical. The reason is that the sorting under C locale is much more effective compared with one under another locales (10-50 times faster for some implementations!). Another reason is that for some applications it is _necessary_ to use different sort order for different tables. For example, I may have two tables: russian_persons and forein_persons, and i'd like to print the sorted list of persons. The russian_persons names must be sorted with ru_RU.KOI8-R locale, and the forein_persons - with C locale.
see Multi-Language Support section on TODO list at http://developer.postgresql.org/todo.php - note that this specifies per-column locales rather than per-table, which should be even more useful.
Most of these items have no names against them, meaning you could work on them ...
cheers
andrew
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