> It depends what language you want to sort. Lots of languages do not > have a sort alphabet. For example, Japanese. It can be quite > difficult to sort unusual languages like this. I am not aware of any > standard technique for sorting Japanese text other than keeping an > arbitrarily sorted dictionary (courtesy of whatever the most popular > Japanese dictionary at the time happens to be perhaps) and then doing > hash lookups in the for indexing values. As you can imagine, this is > not particularly fast. I have not actually tried this, but I expect > PosgreSQL will simply sort in a fairly binary fashion. As in, it gets > sorted in according to the binary value of the characters, or the > UTF-8 offsets, or something like that.
Above is almost correct but usually sorting by the JIS code order is enough for most Japanese applications (I believe same thing can be said to Chinese). I do not recommend using locale for sorting Japanese. It quite frequently happens that the locale support for multibyte encodings is totally broken. See recent posting titled "[GENERAL] Japanese words not distinguished" for more details. If you have to live with UTF-8 database, I recommend turning off the locale support and use CONVERT to sort Japanese. For example, SELECT * FROM t1 ORDER BY CONVERT(col1 USING utf_8_to_euc_jp); > On 12 Jul 2005, at 15:48, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Our product will be storing its character data in utf-8 format > > (unicode encoding). > > > > What is the best way to achive cultural sensitive sorting using the > > utf-8 data? > > > > Is it possible have the locale apply to a connection? > > > > If so, is the cultural sorting support mature in PostgreSQL? > > > > What type of performance can be expected as compared with the > > normal c locale sorting? > > > > Thanks very much, > > > > Steve. > > > > ---------------------------(end of > > broadcast)--------------------------- > > TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate > > subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that > > your > > message can get through to the mailing list cleanly > > > > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
