Glossary / Collation

Collation

Practical PostgreSQL glossary entry with a clear definition, example, and benchmarking context.

What Is Collation?

Collation determines how string values are sorted and compared. PostgreSQL supports multiple collations depending on locale settings.

Why It Matters for PostgreSQL Performance

In PostgreSQL performance work, Collation affects throughput, latency, or operational reliability depending on workload and configuration.

Practical Benchmarking Context

When benchmarking with pgbench, track how Collation changes behavior across scale factor, client concurrency, and storage conditions.

Use this term together with workload shape, concurrency level, and scale factor when interpreting pgbench outputs. Isolated values can be misleading without full run context.

Example

Example: Use ORDER BY name COLLATE "fr_FR" for French sorting.

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