Presented by:

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Jeremy Schneider

GEICO tech

Jeremy Schneider has been programming for 30 years and working with databases for 20 years, first focused on Oracle and later focused on Postgres. He is currently an organizer of the Seattle Postgres User Group. He is also a Postgres Engineer at GEICO tech. Bringing his background with large-scale data processing and enterprise relational databases to the table, he is helping build a next-generation hybrid-cloud database platform - enabling developers to architect and operate applications that are fast and reliable while meeting business requirements such as integration, compliance and security.

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Comparisons are fundamental to computing - and comparing strings is not nearly as straightforward as you might think. Collations, or the ordering and comparison of strings, is continuously evolving along with all the nuances of natural language. But databases use such comparisons everywhere: for ORDER BY, the humble >, <, and = operators, btree indexes, GROUP BY, range partitioning -- even hashing, hash indexes, and hash partitioning. Fundamental decisions from the early days of PostgreSQL have led to surprising challenges. Learn how to navigate these challenges and what new options are available.

First we'll briefly cover the history, nuance and surprises of “putting words in order” that you never knew existed in computer science. Next, walk through a few actual scenarios and demonstrations using Postgres 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 Postgres, and learn more about user and administrative features Postgres provides related to localized string comparison - including significant new features in Postgres 17.

Date:
2024 November 6 15:00 PST
Duration:
50 min
Room:
Ops: 421
Conference:
Seattle 2024
Language:
Track:
Ops
Difficulty:
Medium