This adds a flag "deterministic" to collations. If that is false,
such a collation disables various optimizations that assume that
strings are equal only if they are byte-wise equal. That then allows
use cases such as case-insensitive or accent-insensitive comparisons
or handling of strings with different Unicode normal forms.
This functionality is only supported with the ICU provider. At least
glibc doesn't appear to have any locales that work in a
nondeterministic way, so it's not worth supporting this for the libc
provider.
The term "deterministic comparison" in this context is from Unicode
Technical Standard #10
(https://unicode.org/reports/tr10/#Deterministic_Comparison).
This patch makes changes in three areas:
- CREATE COLLATION DDL changes and system catalog changes to support
this new flag.
- Many executor nodes and auxiliary code are extended to track
collations. Previously, this code would just throw away collation
information, because the eventually-called user-defined functions
didn't use it since they only cared about equality, which didn't
need collation information.
- String data type functions that do equality comparisons and hashing
are changed to take the (non-)deterministic flag into account. For
comparison, this just means skipping various shortcuts and tie
breakers that use byte-wise comparison. For hashing, we first need
to convert the input string to a canonical "sort key" using the ICU
analogue of strxfrm().
Reviewed-by: Daniel Verite <daniel@manitou-mail.org>
Reviewed-by: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/1ccc668f-4cbc-0bef-af67-450b47cdfee7@2ndquadrant.com
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.