Confusion about locales and 'like' indexes - Mailing list pgsql-performance

From Dan Harris
Subject Confusion about locales and 'like' indexes
Date
Msg-id 124c40d023eab9ed34fda472fbb3db3f@drivefaster.net
Whole thread Raw
Responses Re: Confusion about locales and 'like' indexes  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-performance
Greetings,

I have been beating myself up today trying to optimize indices for a
query that uses LIKE.  In my research I have read that the locale
setting may affect PostgreSQL's choice of seq scan vs index scan.  I am
running Fedora Core 2 and it appears when I run "locale" that it is set
to 'en.US-UTF-8'.

Did I fall into a "gotcha" trap here about C vs non-C locales?  I'm not
much of a C programmer so I have no idea what all this touches and
everything has been left as default during PG compilation as well as
Fedora install.   I can pg_dump and initdb again with --locale=C if
this will allow my LIKE queries to use indexes, but I just wanted to
know if there was some other place I needed to change locales in the
system? e.g. postgresql.conf or env vars?  Or, would the initdb and
reload alone fix it?

I'm running 8.0.1 if that matters.

Thanks


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