Re: Multibyte encoding vs. SQL_ASCII vs. locales and European languages

Frank Joerdens <frank(at)joerdens(dot)de> writes:
> What about the performance penalty that you're warned about with
> locales (in the admin guide)?

You pay it if you don't select C locale at initdb time, true.

> Does multibyte support entail the same penalty?

AFAIR, MULTIBYTE doesn't kill LIKE optimization, but it does incur
a generalized performance penalty on all string-mashing operators.
Never tried to measure the size of the penalty; perhaps Tatsuo or
Hiroshi would know.

> If not, then multibyte encoding, providing a superset of the
> locale functionality (correct?), would be better than locales, right?

MULTIBYTE is *not* a superset of LOCALE; they are independently
enablable features. Offhand I don't think they are both interesting
for the same character sets.

regards, tom lane