Stefano Bargioni <bargioni@usc.urbe.it> writes:
> I need to understand why my Postgres 6.5.2 installation sorts results ignoring blanks.
This would be a matter of the LOCALE you are running the code in.
You may want to run the postmaster with environment variable LANG=C
(or possibly LC_ALL=C, depending on your platform).
Caution: this is not something you can change on a whim, because
changing the sort order means any indexes you have on text columns
are now logically out-of-order and thus corrupt. The safest way to
proceed is pg_dumpall, stop postmaster, change LANG, initdb, restart
postmaster, load data. Don't forget to change your system boot script
to ensure the same LANG is provided when you reboot...
regards, tom lane