Actually Greg . . . After a long and careful study of this, this is a Postgres bug. Postgres is boogering up the sort. The operators < >, and the "order by" in the select statement are both case-sensitive and case-insensitive. It is inconsistent. It does not matter what my collating sequence is. This is the behavior I am seeing:
If the words are the same words but letters have different case, then the operator is case-sensitive. If the words are not the same words, then the operator is case-insensitive until the operator reaches the character position in both strings where the letters become different. It is a combination of both case-sensitive and case-insenstive. Completely bogus. It does not matter what computer I am using. I get the same bogus behavior on all my operating systems and Postgres versions. Brian Ceccarelli Talus Software 4605 Woodmill Run Apex, NC 27539 -----Original Message----- From: gsst...@gmail.com [mailto:gsst...@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Greg Stark Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2009 5:50 PM To: Brian Ceccarelli Subject: Re: BUG #4999: select 'a' < 'A' is true, but should be false . . . On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 9:24 PM, Brian Ceccarelli<cecca...@talussoftware.com> wrote: > The operator equals is case sensitive. > The operator < and > are case-insensitive. > This is not consistent. > > Most of the time, operator < and > are case-insenstive, until you compare > the upper and lower cases of the same letter. This is all down to your collation locale. en_US and most other non-C locales sort case insensitively. You'll find the Unix command "sort" and other utilities behave similarly. You can set your lc_collate to C if you want strict ascii binary byte order. In 8.3 and previous this was a cluster-wide setting but in 8.4 you can set it per-database. If you can find any cases that are actually inconsistent (the above examples are not -- you need to find three values where a < b < c but a >= c) then this is a serious problem and you should not use that locale with postgres or it will result in corrupt indexes. -- greg http://mit.edu/~gsstark/resume.pdf -- Sent via pgsql-bugs mailing list (pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-bugs