PostgreSQL 14 Documentation: ALTER COLLATION

ALTER COLLATION
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ALTER COLLATION

ALTER COLLATION — change the definition of a collation

Synopsis

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 Notes below.

Notes

When using collations provided by the ICU library, the ICU-specific version of the collator is recorded in the system catalog when the collation object is created. 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 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 collator 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.

Note

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.

Currently, there is no version tracking for the database default collation.

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:

SELECT pg_describe_object(refclassid, refobjid, refobjsubid) AS "Collation",
       pg_describe_object(classid, objid, objsubid) AS "Object"
  FROM pg_depend d JOIN pg_collation c
       ON refclassid = 'pg_collation'::regclass AND refobjid = c.oid
  WHERE c.collversion <> pg_collation_actual_version(c.oid)
  ORDER BY 1, 2;

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.