Using , instead of . for thousands..

Hi all...i'm converting an access 97 database to pg and i have a little
problem...since i'ìm in italy....thousand use commas as a separator and not
dots (eg 1,000 not 1.000)... is there a function to instruct postgresql to
use the comma instead of the dot?? I would be very usefull because it would
avoid me to open the files i dump with access and find/replace all the
commas with dots...
Btw ... i'm on some testing and this is my situation:
I have a db that has about 10 tables of which 1 has 200000+ records and
others have about 30000....now this db is in access 97 on a dual pII 600
scsi hd 512 mb RAM ecc ecc (a good machine....) now...for testing i'm using
a celeron 500 with 128 mb ram and udma 66 hd and after having exported the
accessdb into postgres i can see that to open a table with the access
97/dual pIII machine takes me about 10 secs...the same table opened on the
cel with postgres takes about 5 secs...am i crazy or can i really gain so
much speed on pg..??!!??
Thanks for your answers and sorry if my english is not really good..