Thread: Issues with inconsistent COLLATION installation

Cory Nemelka <cnemelka@gmail.com> writes:
> Here is encoding for existing database:
>                                   List of databases
> ┌───────────┬──────────┬──────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬───────────────────────┐
> │   Name    │  Owner   │ Encoding │   Collate   │    Ctype    │   Access
> privileges   │
> ├───────────┼──────────┼──────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼───────────────────────┤
> │ thedatabase │ postgres │ UTF8     │ en_US.UTF-8 │ en_US.UTF-8 │
>             │

Hmm.  It's interesting that the collate/ctype locales say "UTF-8"
where locale -a says "utf8".  It's not apparent to me what relation
that might have to your observed problem, but it suggests that
this cluster doesn't exactly have a pristine history.  Did you
perhaps try to move the data files from one platform to another?

            regards, tom lane

    Cory Nemelka wrote:

> ERROR:  22023: could not create locale "fr_FR.utf8": No such file or
> directory
> DETAIL:  The operating system could not find any locale data for the locale
> name "fr_FR.utf8".
> LOCATION:  report_newlocale_failure, pg_locale.c:1312

I can reproduce this by creating a new locale *after* starting
PostgreSQL and trying to use it before a restart.

Example with Ubuntu 18.04 and Postgres 11.5:

# locale-gen es_ES.utf8
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
  es_ES.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.

Immediately refering to the locale will fail:

$ sudo -u postgres psql -d test -U postgres

test=# create collation es (provider=libc, locale='es_ES.utf8');
ERROR:    could not create locale "es_ES.utf8": No such file or directory
DÉTAIL : The operating system could not find any locale data for the locale
name "es_ES.utf8".


Now restart postgresql

$ sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql restart
[ ok ] Restarting postgresql (via systemctl): postgresql.service.

And now it works:

$ sudo -u postgres psql -d test -U postgres

test=# create collation es (provider=libc, locale='es_ES.utf8');
CREATE COLLATION

test=# select * from pg_collation where collname='es' \gx
-[ RECORD 1 ]-+-----------
collname      | es
collnamespace | 2200
collowner     | 10
collprovider  | c
collencoding  | 6
collcollate   | es_ES.utf8
collctype     | es_ES.utf8
collversion   |


Best regards,
--
Daniel Vérité
PostgreSQL-powered mailer: http://www.manitou-mail.org
Twitter: @DanielVerite

"Daniel Verite" <daniel@manitou-mail.org> writes:
> I can reproduce this by creating a new locale *after* starting
> PostgreSQL and trying to use it before a restart.

That is interesting.  I think it must mean that glibc's setlocale()
and newlocale() maintain some kind of internal cache about available
locales ... and there's no logic to flush it if /usr/share/locale
changes.  The individual backends are probably inheriting the cache
state via fork from the postmaster.

            regards, tom lane