Re: Built-in CTYPE provider

Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com>

From: Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com>
To: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>, Daniel Verite <daniel@manitou-mail.org>
Cc: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, Jeremy Schneider <schneider@ardentperf.com>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2024-04-03T23:19:02Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Tue, 2024-03-26 at 08:14 +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> 
> Full vs. simple case mapping is more of a legacy compatibility
> question, 
> in my mind.  There is some expectation/precedent that C.UTF-8 uses 
> simple case mapping, but beyond that, I don't see a reason why
> someone 
> would want to explicitly opt for simple case mapping, other than if
> they 
> need length preservation or something, but if they need that, then
> they 
> are going to be in a world of pain in Unicode anyway.

I mostly agree, though there are some other purposes for the simple
mapping:

* a substitute for case folding: lower() with simple case mapping will
work better for that purpose than lower() with full case mapping (after
we have casefold(), this won't be a problem)

* simple case mapping is conceptually simpler, and that's a benefit by
itself in some situations -- maybe the 1:1 assumption exists other
places in their application

> > There's also another reason to consider it an argument rather than
> > a
> > collation property, which is that it might be dependent on some
> > other
> > field in a row. I could imagine someone wanting to do:
> > 
> >     SELECT
> >       UPPER(some_field,
> >             full => true,
> >             dotless_i => CASE other_field WHEN ...)
> >     FROM ...
> 
> Can you index this usefully?  It would only work if the user query 
> matches exactly this pattern?

In that example, UPPER is used in the target list -- the WHERE clause
might be indexable. The UPPER is just used for display purposes, and
may depend on some locale settings stored in another table associated
with a particular user.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis




Commits

  1. Support PG_UNICODE_FAST locale in the builtin collation provider.

  2. Support Unicode full case mapping and conversion.

  3. Fix test failures when language environment is not UTF-8.

  4. Add unicode_strtitle() for Unicode Default Case Conversion.

  5. Use version for builtin collations.

  6. Fix convert_case(), introduced in 5c40364dd6.

  7. Inline basic UTF-8 functions.

  8. Support C.UTF-8 locale in the new builtin collation provider.

  9. Fix another warning, introduced by 846311051e.

  10. Address more review comments on commit 2d819a08a1.

  11. Fix unreachable code warning from commit 2d819a08a1.

  12. Introduce "builtin" collation provider.

  13. Catalog changes preparing for builtin collation provider.

  14. Unicode case mapping tables and functions.

  15. Add Unicode property tables.

  16. Documentation update for Standard Collations.

  17. Cleanup for unicode-update build target and test.

  18. Shrink Unicode category table.

  19. Make some error strings more generic

  20. pg_upgrade: copy locale and encoding information to new cluster.

  21. Update Unicode data to Unicode 15.0.0

  22. Create a new type category for "internal use" types.