On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 10:05 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
Chris Travers <chris.travers@gmail.com> writes: > As for whether UTF-8 is the default, it is in many cases, but I remember > struggling with the fact that a few Linux distros still default to > SQL-ASCII. Ultimately this is something of a packaging issue and the > default may be set at the package level.
Actually, the default is taken from the locale environment that initdb sees. So it's a question of what the distro initializes LANG to (and whether you've changed that, either system-wide or for the postgres user).
regards, tom lane
I'd like to call this one solved - at least mostly. I am not sure what happened before, but when I tried installing the ltree module on template1 previously, it did not seem to make any difference when I created a new DB. I could not create an ltree field. Fast forward to now, and (with a fresh postgres server) installed ltree on template1 and then connected and successfully created a test db (using the "-e unicode" option), along with a table using the ltree datatype.
This actually resolves the core issue - being able to create new databases and use the ltree data type.
Two related points remain a bit confusing, but I will read up more and re-post if I cannot figure them out.
