Schedule - PGConf.dev 2026

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Text encoding débacles

Date: 2026-05-21
Time: 09:30–10:20
Room: Fletcher (1900)
Level: Intermediate
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You might think that text encoding is a problem that was solved by UTF-8. This is basically true for many developers, but PostgreSQL continues to support dozens of encodings and multi-encoding configurations. There are some rough and even dangerous edges, with implications even if you only use UTF-8. I want to present prototypes to address those with a practical model, and some other opportunities I have spotted along the way.

  • Overview of the PostgreSQL text encoding model, related OS concepts and motivations
  • The holes in that model, including shared catalogs and views, authentication, file systems and more
  • In which usage patterns do we get away with that? Or not?
  • A proposed model to nail down the encoding of everything, while allowing for reasonable usage patterns
  • Overview of closely related pg_wchar, holes and improvements
  • Opportunities to go faster
  • What would it take to support NUL in text?

Speaker

Thomas Munro