CREATE_COLLATION(7pg14)

✨ NAME ✨

okay so bestie, this is the CREATE_COLLATION page — the CREATE_COLLATION(7pg14) one from PostgreSQL 14.24 — and it’s literally all about defining a new collation 💅✨. In one-line manpage terms: define a new collation. That’s the whole vibe. 🎀

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

CREATE COLLATION [ IF NOT EXISTS ] name (
    [ LOCALE = locale, ]
    [ LC_COLLATE = lc_collate, ]
    [ LC_CTYPE = lc_ctype, ]
    [ PROVIDER = provider, ]
    [ DETERMINISTIC = boolean, ]
    [ VERSION = version ]
)
CREATE COLLATION [ IF NOT EXISTS ] name FROM existing_collation

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so what does CREATE COLLATION do? It defines a new collation using the specified operating system locale settings, or by copying an existing collation 🦋. That’s the main character move.

To be able to create a collation, you must have CREATE privilege on the destination schema. No privilege, no collation, periodt 👑.

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✨ PARAMETERS ✨

• IF NOT EXISTS — do not throw an error if a collation with the same name already exists. A notice is issued in this case. Note that there is no guarantee that the existing collation is anything like the one that would have been created 🙈.
• name — the name of the collation. The collation name can be schema-qualified. If it is not, the collation is defined in the current schema. The collation name must be unique within that schema. (The system catalogs can contain collations with the same name for other encodings, but these are ignored if the database encoding does not match.) 💖
• locale — this is a shortcut for setting LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE at once. If you specify this, you cannot specify either of those parameters ⚠️.
• lc_collate — use the specified operating system locale for the LC_COLLATE locale category 🌸.
• lc_ctype — use the specified operating system locale for the LC_CTYPE locale category 🌸.
• provider — specifies the provider to use for locale services associated with this collation. Possible values are: icu, libc. libc is the default. The available choices depend on the operating system and build options 🧚.
• DETERMINISTIC — specifies whether the collation should use deterministic comparisons. The default is true. A deterministic comparison considers strings that are not byte-wise equal to be unequal even if they are considered logically equal by the comparison. PostgreSQL breaks ties using a byte-wise comparison. A comparison that is not deterministic can make the collation be, say, case- or accent-insensitive. For that, you need to choose an appropriate LOCALE setting and set the collation to not deterministic here. Nondeterministic collations are only supported with the ICU provider 🚨.
• version — specifies the version string to store with the collation. Normally, this should be omitted, which will cause the version to be computed from the actual version of the collation as provided by the operating system. This option is intended to be used by pg_upgrade for copying the version from an existing installation. See also ALTER COLLATION (ALTER_COLLATION(7)) for how to handle collation version mismatches 🫶.
• existing_collation — the name of an existing collation to copy. The new collation will have the same properties as the existing one, but it will be an independent object 🎀.

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✨ NOTES ✨

• CREATE COLLATION takes a SHARE ROW EXCLUSIVE lock, which is self-conflicting, on the pg_collation system catalog, so only one CREATE COLLATION command can run at a time 🔒.
• Use DROP COLLATION to remove user-defined collations 🧹.
• See Section 24.2.2.3 for more information on how to create collations 📚.
• When using the libc collation provider, the locale must be applicable to the current database encoding. See CREATE DATABASE (CREATE_DATABASE(7)) for the precise rules 🧐.

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✨ EXAMPLES ✨

To create a collation from the operating system locale fr_FR.utf8 (assuming the current database encoding is UTF8):

CREATE COLLATION french (locale = 'fr_FR.utf8');

To create a collation using the ICU provider using German phone book sort order:

CREATE COLLATION german_phonebook (provider = icu, locale = 'de-u-co-phonebk');

To create a collation from an existing collation:

CREATE COLLATION german FROM "de_DE";

This can be convenient to be able to use operating-system-independent collation names in applications ✨.

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✨ COMPATIBILITY ✨

There is a CREATE COLLATION statement in the SQL standard, but it is limited to copying an existing collation. The syntax to create a new collation is a PostgreSQL extension 💅.

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• ALTER COLLATION (ALTER_COLLATION(7))
• DROP COLLATION (DROP_COLLATION(7))

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okay that’s the whole page bestie 🫶 — source/version: PostgreSQL 14.24, dated 2026. Slay responsibly, and remember: collations are literally the vibe check for your strings 💖✨