Built-in collation provider committed to PostgreSQL 17 (still in development) complements of Jeff Davis. This is a huge step forward for PostgreSQL users! If you don't understand why, you should research it.
The bigger deal in my view is that it provides at least an option for a Postgres project controlled, built-in, immutable collation. Unlike glibc or ICU which are historically the only options (mostly glibc), and both of which are known to change their collation ordering from time to time completely outside control of the Postgres developers. If you want a deeper dive on why this is an issue, please watch the presentation I gave at pgcon last year found linked here: https://www.pgcon.org/events/pgcon_2023/schedule/session/345...
The platform indepenence alone would be worth it, I think, irrespective of any perf gains!
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/ff4c2f2f9c8fc7ca2...
""" v15:Performance:
Sotring 10M strings:
libc "C" 14s
builtin C_UTF8 14s
libc "C.utf8" 20s
ICU "en-US-x-icu" 31s
Running UPPER() on 10M strings:
libc "C" 03s
builtin C_UTF8 07s
libc "C.utf8" 08s
ICU "en-US-x-icu" 15s""" v20Performance:
ASCII-only data:
lower initcap upper
"C" (libc) 2426 3326 2341
pg_c_utf8 2890 6570 2825
pg_unicode_fast 2929 7140 2893
"C.utf8" (libc) 5410 7810 5397
"en-US-x-icu" 8320 65732 9367
Including non-ASCII data:
lower initcap upper
"C" (libc) 2630 4677 2548
pg_c_utf8 5471 10682 5431
pg_unicode_fast 5582 12023 5587
"C.utf8" (libc) 8126 11834 8106
"en-US-x-icu" 14473 73655 15112Then again, I've been working with databases long enough to know that there's really no such thing as a "typical query" so now that I think about it, my question was a bit pointless or at least unanswerable.