Change Database Collation, Ctype in Postgresql

Question

how do I change Collation, cType to - en_IN from en_US.UTF-8

                              List of databases
   Name    |  Owner   | Encoding |  Collation  |    Ctype    |   Access privileges   
-----------+----------+----------+-------------+-------------+-----------------------
 postgres  | postgres | UTF8     | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 | 
 template0 | postgres | UTF8     | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 | =c/postgres
                                                             : postgres=CTc/postgres
 template1 | postgres | UTF8     | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 | =c/postgres
                                                             : postgres=CTc/postgres

my current postgresversion is 8.4 ive installed it using

sudo apt-get install postgresql-8.4 postgresql-contrib-8.4

im doing this in my ubuntu amazon server ec2

Answer 1

My recommendation:

1. take a pg_dumpall

2. re-initialize the db cluster, making sure the locale information is correct

3. restore your dump.

I have found that sometimes it is possible that one may have to create a db with template template0 (-T template0 from bash or WITH TEMPLATE template0 from psql) to use a non-init-db locale.

Answer 2

It's not necessary to recreate the whole database cluster. You need however to recreate your database.

Run createdb with these options (man createdb):

   -E encoding, --encoding=encoding
       Specifies the character encoding scheme to be used in this
       database. The character sets supported by the PostgreSQL server
       are described in Section 22.3.1, “Supported Character Sets”, in
       the documentation.

   -l locale, --locale=locale
       Specifies the locale to be used in this database. This is
       equivalent to specifying both --lc-collate and --lc-ctype.

   --lc-collate=locale
       Specifies the LC_COLLATE setting to be used in this database.

   --lc-ctype=locale
       Specifies the LC_CTYPE setting to be used in this database.

It seems you really can't change the collation of an existing database:

=> ALTER DATABASE dbname SET "Collate" To Russian;
ERROR:  unrecognized configuration parameter "Collate"

Note that you can set collation for a table or a column, see a good tutorial on collations in PostgreSQL.

Answer 3

This worked for me for my DEV database. Do not try this for your production database. You may loose existing indexes.

Repeat below query for template1 & template0 as well

update pg_database set datcollate='en_IN', datctype='UTF-8' where datname='postgres'

Answer 4

its Very very Simple Solutions.

Step1. su - postgres Step2. psql Setp3. update pg_database set encoding = pg_char_to_encoding('UTF8') where datname = 'icinga'; (dont'forget to add ;) Step4. \l to check