String Comparison Surprises: Did Postgres lose my data?

Jeremy Schneider

Comparisons are fundamental to computing – and comparing strings is not nearly as straightforward as you might think. Come learn about the history, nuance and surprises of “putting words in order” that you never knew existed in computer science, and how that nuance impacts both general programming and SQL programming. Next, walk through a few actual scenarios and demonstrations using PostgreSQL as a user and administrator, which you can re-run yourself later for further study, including one way you could easily corrupt your self-managed PostgreSQL database if you aren’t prepared. Finally we’ll dive into an explanation of the surprising behaviors we saw in PostgreSQL, and learn more about user and administrative features PostgreSQL provides related to localized string comparison.