Re: Multilingual application, ORDER BY w/ different locales?

On Sat, 17 Nov 2001, Tom Lane wrote:

> Stephan Szabo <sszabo@megazone23.bigpanda.com> writes:
> > Would it be possible to make a function in plpgsql or whatever that
> > wrapped the collate changes and then order by that and make functional
> > indexes?  Would the system use it?
>
> IIRC, we were debating whether we should consider collation to be an
> attribute of the datatype (think typmod) or an attribute of individual
> values (think field added to values of textual types).  In the former
> case, a function like this would only work if we allowed its result to
> be declared as having the right collate attribute.  Which is not
> impossible, but we don't currently associate any typmod with function
> arguments or results, and so I'm not sure how painful it would be.
> With the field-in-data-value approach it's easy to see how it would
> work.  But another byte or word per text value might be a high price
> to pay ...

True.  Although I wonder how things like substring would work in the
model with typmods if the collation isn't attached in any fashion to
the return values since I think the substring collation is supposed
to be the same as the input string's, whereas for something like
convert it's a different collation based on a parameter. I wonder if
as a temporary thing, you could use a function that did something
similar to strxfrm as long as you only used that for sorting purposes.