Re: Change postgresql encoding

On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 2:20 PM, Oliver <ofabelo(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> If I want change postgresql encoding, I have understood that I should
> reinstall postgresql (I do installation from rpm official binary files for
> red hat)
>

I can't answer your question about whether the encodings need to be the
same, but I'm pretty sure that's not true. CREATE DATABASE has options to
set the encoding for a database:

CREATE DATABASE korean WITH ENCODING 'EUC_KR' LC_COLLATE='ko_KR.euckr'
LC_CTYPE='ko_KR.euckr' TEMPLATE=template0;

(From http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/multibyte.html)

To change the encoding of an existing PG database, you have to 1) dump it,
2) create a new, empty DB with the desired encoding, and 3) import the dump
into the new DB. So you can't really change it "on the fly," but it can be
done at creation time.