Re: Curious sorting puzzle

Ivan Voras <ivoras(at)fer(dot)hr> writes:
> The situation is this: we're using a varchar column to store
> alphanumeric codes which are by themselves 7-bit clean. But we are
> operating under a locale which has its own special collation rules, and
> is also utf-8 encoded. Recently we've discovered a serious "d'oh!"-type
> bug which we tracked down to the fact that when we sort by this column
> the collation respects locale sorting rules, which is messing up other
> parts of the application.

> The question is: what is the most efficient way to solve this problem
> (the required operation is to sort data using binary "collation" - i.e.
> compare byte by byte)? Since this field gets queried a lot it must have
> an index. Some of the possible solutions we thought of are: replacing
> the varchar type with numeric and do magical transcoding (bad, needs
> changes thoughout the application) and inserting spaces after every
> character (not as bad, but still requires modifying both the application
> and the data). An ideal solution would be to have a
> "not-locale-affected-varchar" field type :)

If you're just storing ASCII then I think bytea might work for this.
Do you need any actual text operations (like concatenation), or this
just a store-and-retrieve field?

If you need text ops too then probably the best answer is to make your
own datatype. It's not that hard --- look at the citext datatype (on
pgfoundry IIRC, or else gborg) for a closely related example.

regards, tom lane