Thread: locale and performance?

Hello,
in the documentation is written that there'a a perfomrance impact if
another locale than C or POSIX is used.
problem is that using the standard locale results in unusable order
results for languages with spcial chars. in my example "umlauts" in
german.

it isn't acceptable to use the database without indexes if another
locale is used. are custom operator classes as described in the manual
as high-performance as the native index? are there any examples how to
use them in my case?

are there any tests that show how the performance decreases if another
locale is used? why is there a perfomance impact? it's a disappointing
that postgresql is only in one configuration to suply the max.
performance.

any tips or hints on that?

regards

Daniel

Daniel Weinand wrote:
> it isn't acceptable to use the database without indexes if another
> locale is used. are custom operator classes as described in the
> manual as high-performance as the native index?

I'm not sure what you are comparing here, because the different operator
classes serve different use cases.  The operator classes are as fast as
they can be to solve the problem at hand.  Whether they are fast enough
for you is up to your testing.

> are there any examples how to use them in my case?

Perhaps, but you didn't tell us what your case is.

> are there any tests that show how the performance decreases if
> another locale is used? why is there a perfomance impact?

Because having a computer sort letters in an order useful for humans is
slower than sorting them in an order useful for computers.  And vice
versa!

> it's a
> disappointing that postgresql is only in one configuration to suply
> the max. performance.

That is nonsense.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/