Re: Patch for collation using ICU

Tom Lane wrote:
> Sent: Monday, May 09, 2005 2:47 AM
> To: Palle Girgensohn
> Cc: Tatsuo Ishii; John Hansen; alvherre@dcc.uchile.cl;
> pgman@candle.pha.pa.us; pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
> Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Patch for collation using ICU
>
> Palle Girgensohn <girgen@pingpong.net> writes:
> >> I'm confused. I thought the ICU patches is intended for using on
> >> broken locale platforms?
>
> > It will sort correctly in *one* locale, using ICU. You still cannot
> > mix different locales in the same database cluster, the collation
> > locale is still fixed at initdb time, unfortunately.
>
> I thought the point of using ICU was to be able to dig out
> from under that restriction?  It's a bit of a large pill to
> swallow if we will still have to throw it away someday to
> become SQL spec compliant.

That is not a limitation of ICU but of postgresql.
I don't know what the specs say, but imagine something like:
SELECT foo FROM bar ORDER BY foo WITH LOCALE 'en_US', foobar WITH LOCALE
'jp_JP';

Which would be less difficult to implement using ICU.

>
>             regards, tom lane
>
>

... John