ALTER COLLATION
ALTER COLLATION
7
SQL - Language Statements
ALTER COLLATION
change the definition of a collation
ALTER COLLATION name REFRESH VERSION
ALTER COLLATION name RENAME TO new_name
ALTER COLLATION name OWNER TO { new_owner | CURRENT_ROLE | CURRENT_USER | SESSION_USER }
ALTER COLLATION name SET SCHEMA new_schema
Description
ALTER COLLATION changes the definition of a
collation.
You must own the collation to use ALTER COLLATION.
To alter the owner, you must also be a direct or indirect member of the new
owning role, and that role must have CREATE privilege on
the collation's schema. (These restrictions enforce that altering the
owner doesn't do anything you couldn't do by dropping and recreating the
collation. However, a superuser can alter ownership of any collation
anyway.)
Parameters
name
The name (optionally schema-qualified) of an existing collation.
new_name
The new name of the collation.
new_owner
The new owner of the collation.
new_schema
The new schema for the collation.
REFRESH VERSION
Update the collation's version.
See below.
Notes
When a collation object is created, the provider-specific version of the
collation is recorded in the system catalog. When the collation is used,
the current version is
checked against the recorded version, and a warning is issued when there is
a mismatch, for example:
WARNING: collation "xx-x-icu" has version mismatch
DETAIL: The collation in the database was created using version 1.2.3.4, but the operating system provides version 2.3.4.5.
HINT: Rebuild all objects affected by this collation and run ALTER COLLATION pg_catalog."xx-x-icu" REFRESH VERSION, or build PostgreSQL with the right library version.
A change in collation definitions can lead to corrupt indexes and other
problems because the database system relies on stored objects having a
certain sort order. Generally, this should be avoided, but it can happen
in legitimate circumstances, such as when upgrading the operating system
to a new major version or when
using pg_upgrade to upgrade to server binaries linked
with a newer version of ICU. When this happens, all objects depending on
the collation should be rebuilt, for example,
using REINDEX. When that is done, the collation version
can be refreshed using the command ALTER COLLATION ... REFRESH
VERSION. This will update the system catalog to record the
current collation version and will make the warning go away. Note that this
does not actually check whether all affected objects have been rebuilt
correctly.
When using collations provided by libc, version
information is recorded on systems using the GNU C library (most Linux
systems), FreeBSD and Windows. When using collations provided by ICU, the
version information is provided by the ICU library and is available on all
platforms.
When using the GNU C library for collations, the C library's version
is used as a proxy for the collation version. Many Linux distributions
change collation definitions only when upgrading the C library, but this
approach is imperfect as maintainers are free to back-port newer
collation definitions to older C library releases.
When using Windows for collations, version information is only available
for collations defined with BCP 47 language tags such as
en-US.
For the database default collation, there is an analogous command
ALTER DATABASE ... REFRESH COLLATION VERSION.
The following query can be used to identify all collations in the current
database that need to be refreshed and the objects that depend on them:
pg_collation_actual_version(c.oid)
ORDER BY 1, 2;
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Examples
To rename the collation de_DE to
german:
ALTER COLLATION "de_DE" RENAME TO german;
To change the owner of the collation en_US to
joe:
ALTER COLLATION "en_US" OWNER TO joe;
Compatibility
There is no ALTER COLLATION statement in the SQL
standard.
See Also