It depends what language you want to sort. Lots of languages do not have a sort alphabet. For example, Japanese. It can be quite difficult to sort unusual languages like this. I am not aware of any standard technique for sorting Japanese text other than keeping an arbitrarily sorted dictionary (courtesy of whatever the most popular Japanese dictionary at the time happens to be perhaps) and then doing hash lookups in the for indexing values. As you can imagine, this is not particularly fast. I have not actually tried this, but I expect PosgreSQL will simply sort in a fairly binary fashion. As in, it gets sorted in according to the binary value of the characters, or the UTF-8 offsets, or something like that.

On 12 Jul 2005, at 15:48, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Our product will be storing its character data in utf-8 format (unicode encoding).

What is the best way to achive cultural sensitive sorting using the utf-8 data?

Is it possible have the locale apply to a connection?

If so, is the cultural sorting support mature in PostgreSQL?

What type of performance can be expected as compared with the normal c locale sorting?

Thanks very much,

Steve.

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