The PostgreSQL 9.0 Reference Manual - Volume 3 - Server Administration Guide by The PostgreSQL Global Development Group Paperback (6"x9"), 274 pages ISBN 9781906966072 RRP £9.95 ($14.95) Sales of this book support the PostgreSQL project! Get a printed copy>>>

PostgreSQL 9.0 Reference Manual Volume 3 Buy the book here! >>> support free documentation

16.2.2 Locale differences

If you run the tests against a server that was initialized with a collation-order locale other than C, then there might be differences due to sort order and subsequent failures. The regression test suite is set up to handle this problem by providing alternate result files that together are known to handle a large number of locales.

To run the tests in a different locale when using the temporary-installation method, pass the appropriate locale-related environment variables on the make command line, for example:

gmake check LANG=de_DE.utf8

(The regression test driver unsets LC_ALL, so it does not work to choose the locale using that variable.) To use no locale, either unset all locale-related environment variables (or set them to C) or use the following special invocation:

gmake check NO_LOCALE=1

When running the tests against an existing installation, the locale setup is determined by the existing installation. To change it, initialize the database cluster with a different locale by passing the appropriate options to initdb.

In general, it is nevertheless advisable to try to run the regression tests in the locale setup that is wanted for production use, as this will exercise the locale- and encoding-related code portions that will actually be used in production. Depending on the operating system environment, you might get failures, but then you will at least know what locale-specific behaviors to expect when running real applications.