I have installed 7.4.6 on the new server - no problems so far.
Now I'm trying to figure out what locale options were passed to initdb for our current live server when it was created. (And whether they are in fact correct for our needs - see below?!)
pg_controldata gives the following output:
pg_control version number: 72 Catalog version number: 200310211 Database cluster state: in production pg_control last modified: Thu 13 Jan 2005 12:26:47 GMT Current log file ID: 18 Next log file segment: 133 Latest checkpoint location: 12/84411BBC Prior checkpoint location: 12/843E0D78 Latest checkpoint's REDO location: 12/84411BBC Latest checkpoint's UNDO location: 0/0 Latest checkpoint's StartUpID: 167 Latest checkpoint's NextXID: 392845890 Latest checkpoint's NextOID: 400628 Time of latest checkpoint: Thu 13 Jan 2005 12:26:45 GMT Database block size: 8192 Blocks per segment of large relation: 131072 Maximum length of identifiers: 64 Maximum number of function arguments: 32 Date/time type storage: floating-point numbers Maximum length of locale name: 128 LC_COLLATE: C LC_CTYPE: C
and locale -a offers the following (on both servers):
locale -a C en_AU en_AU.utf8 en_BW en_BW.utf8 en_CA en_CA.utf8 en_DK en_DK.utf8 en_GB en_GB.iso885915 en_GB.utf8 en_HK en_HK.utf8 en_IE en_IE@euro en_IE.utf8 en_IE.utf8@euro en_IN en_NZ en_NZ.utf8 en_PH en_PH.utf8 en_SG en_SG.utf8 en_US en_US.iso885915 en_US.utf8 en_ZA en_ZA.utf8 en_ZW en_ZW.utf8 POSIX
Listing the databases (on our live server) gives the following output:
Name | Owner | Encoding ---------------+----------+---------- db_live | postgres | UNICODE template0 | postgres | UNICODE template1 | postgres | UNICODE
Basically our database serves a java web application where we want to store data from several european languages (mixed in the same tables). We're happy to accept "english" sorting rules...
Question 1) Should we try to determine what locale setting was used for our live database and use that for the new server, or should we be using the following for the new db (because we're in the UK):
initdb --locale en_GB.utf8
Question 2) Or should be go for the C locale regardless of the current locale setting on the live server (since we happy with "english" sorting and indexing)? And does that work with UNICODE encoding?
Question 3) If the new database locale is different from the current live one, as we going to get problems when dumping and restoring between the two databases?
Question 4) Because we want to make use of slony - could differences in the locale cause problems down the line - if we use a different locale for initdb for the new db?
Sorry if I'm asking dumb questions, but this whole locale thing and its implications has me totally baffled. I need to get this right because I can't afford to trash our db or data.
Thanks for any help anyone can give.
John Sidney-Woollett
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