Re: Collation version tracking for macOS

> On Jun 6, 2022, at 17:10, Jim Nasby <nasbyj(at)amazon(dot)com> wrote:
> Ignoring broken backups, segfaults and data corruption as a "rant" implies that we simply throw in the towel and tell users to suck it up or switch engines.

Well now, let’s be clear, I was the one who called my email a “rant”. 🙂

And I do apologize for that - it was grumpy and impulsive and Tom isn’t wrong that rants don’t usually help move things forward.

Thomas - thanks for the link back to one of the threads. I spent some time reading through that and it’s a lot of material; I haven’t read the whole thread yet. If you have some others that would also be particularly good background, let me know. I’m doing a chunk of this in my spare time at the moment, but I do want to keep getting more up to speed. I was pulled into a bunch of various things related to PostgreSQL and ICU and collation and OS’s over the past couple years, so I learned a lot from on-the-ground experience and I am interested in trying to get a little more involved in the conversation here.

Personally, I really do think there should at least be an *option* to tell the DB to fully error rather than just warn on version mismatch. Correctness matters to many users, and being able to *trust* string comparisons are correct is pretty damn fundamental all throughout a database. It really doesn’t get any more basic and the potential for bad things to happen is pretty astronomical, if you can’t trust those. I understand the consternation about dealing with upgrades of large & busy databases, but I’m still surprised that the community consensus arrived at the present behavior, and I have a lot of reading to do, to really understand how that happened and where the dialogue is today.

Multiple versions of ICU sounds nice for users who need real linguistic collation (like what Oracle and DB2 offer), but I still feel like there needs to be a super simple basic “pseudo-linguistic” collation baked in, that’s “good enough” for 99% of users and that is guaranteed to be the same everywhere on every platform and just won’t ever change. I think glibc needs to be phased out somehow. At a minimum, not the default for new users… to stop the bleeding. If MySQL wasn’t GPL then I’d say to just copy their collations. I’d be reluctant to spend too much time on a POC now though, it feels like my idea is the outlier and the general PG hacker consensus would be to reject this idea. (But maybe I’m wrong?)

Anyway, again, apologies for my pants-on-fire email last week. I hope I can enjoy a few beers someday - or coffee for the non-drinkers - with a few other PG collation nerds (which I never set out to be, but it may have befallen me <g>).

-Jeremy

Sent from my TI-83