> The core problem is: given a string "foo", find a string "fop" that
> is greater than any possible extension "foobar" of "foo". We need
> not find the least such string (else it would indeed be a hard
> problem), just a reasonably close upper bound. The algorithm we have
> in 7.0.* increments the last byte(s) of "foo" until it finds
> something greater than "foo". That handles collation orders that are
> different from numerical order, but it still breaks down in the cases
> Peter mentions.
This increment seems sub-optimal.
>
> One variant I've been wondering about is to test a candidate bound
> string against not only "foo", but all single-character extensions of
> "foo", ie, "foo\001" through "foo\255". That would catch situations
> like the one most recently complained of, where the last character
> of the proposed bound string is just a noise-character in dictionary
> order. But I'm afraid it's still not good enough to catch all cases
> ... and it doesn't generalize to MULTIBYTE very well anyway.
This was my suggestion, to test all 255 chars and find the lowest that
is greater than the target, but I see that multi-byte would be a
problem. Oh, well. I hoped some postmaster-generated lookup table
could fix this.
-- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us | (610)
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