Re: ISO8859_1 vs UTF-8 Performance?

On 10/22/2013 4:15 PM, Caroline Beltran wrote:
> I am not a PostgresSQL user but would like to hear from users who have
> configured their database to use the UTF-8 charset, especially any
> users using the case and accent insensitive collation.
>
> I am using a open source SQL server at this time using ISO8859_1 and
> performance is excellent but I recreated the structure using UTF-8 and
> imported the data in a test environment and the performance was
> totally unacceptable. Example:
>
> An unoptimized (no index) query under ISO8859_1 runs in about 15ms and
> took almost 6.5 seconds under UTF-8.
>
> Creating an index did help but performance was still unacceptable.
> Using the same query under ISO8859_1 now took a reported 0ms while
> taking 109ms under UTF-8.

I rarely see more than a 5% difference between SQL_ASCII (eg, no char
encoding at all) and en_US.utf8 with postgresql.

postgres doesn't have any sort of 'case insensitive collation' built in,
there's citext as an addon, and you can do things with functional
indexes of lower(fieldname).

--
john r pierce 37N 122W
somewhere on the middle of the left coast