Re: Unicode license compatibility with PostgreSQL license

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 11:03 PM, Haribabu Kommi
<kommi(dot)haribabu(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> For our next set of development activities in PostgreSQL, we want to
> use the Unicode organization code with PostgreSQL to open source that
> feature. Is the Unicode license is compatible with PostgreSQL.

Do you mean that you'd like to add ICU support? I think that would be
extremely interesting, FWIW. The stability of ICU collations would be
quite helpful from a number of different perspective. One of which is
that having a contract about the stability of strxfrm()-style binary
keys would allow me to make text abbreviated keys exploited in the
internal pages of B-Tree indexes, to greatly reduce cache misses with
index scans on text attributes. This general technique already been
very effective with sorting [1], but it feels likely that we'll need
ICU to make the abbreviation technique useful for indexes.

[1] http://pgeoghegan.blogspot.com/2015/01/abbreviated-keys-exploiting-locality-to.html
--
Regards,
Peter Geoghegan