ALTER_COLLATION(7pg16)

🌸 NAME 🌸

okay bestie, welcome to the ALTER_COLLATION(7pg16) page — the manual for ALTER COLLATION. It literally exists to change the definition of a collation. Tiny command, big catalog energy 💅✨.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

Here’s the syntax tea, exactly as it is:

ALTER COLLATION name REFRESH VERSION

ALTER COLLATION name RENAME TO new_name
ALTER COLLATION name OWNER TO { new_owner | CURRENT_ROLE | CURRENT_USER | SESSION_USER }
ALTER COLLATION name SET SCHEMA new_schema

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

ALTER COLLATION changes the definition of a collation. That’s the headline, and it ate 💖.

You must own the collation to use ALTER COLLATION. To alter the owner, you must be able to SET ROLE to the new owning role, and that role must have CREATE privilege on the collation’s schema. (These restrictions enforce that altering the owner doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do by dropping and recreating the collation. However, a superuser can alter ownership of any collation anyway.)

No cap, the auth checks are part of the vibe check here 🫶.

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🎀 PARAMETERS 🎀

• name — the name (optionally schema-qualified) of an existing collation. Existing only, bestie; we’re not manifesting imaginary collations ✨.
• new_name — the new name of the collation. A little rename glow-up 🦋.
• new_owner — the new owner of the collation. Passing the crown 👑.
• new_schema — the new schema for the collation. Moving it to a new neighborhood 🏡.
• REFRESH VERSION — update the collation’s version. See Notes below. This is the “recheck the version vibes” move 💅.

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🦋 NOTES 🦋

When a collation object is created, the provider-specific version of the collation is recorded in the system catalog. When the collation is used, the current version is checked against the recorded version, and a warning is issued when there is a mismatch, for example:

WARNING:  collation "xx-x-icu" has version mismatch
DETAIL:  The collation in the database was created using version 1.2.3.4, but the operating system provides version 2.3.4.5.
HINT:  Rebuild all objects affected by this collation and run ALTER COLLATION pg_catalog."xx-x-icu" REFRESH VERSION, or build PostgreSQL with the right library version.

This next bit is the actual scary part, bestie: a change in collation definitions can lead to corrupt indexes and other problems because the database system relies on stored objects having a certain sort order. Generally, this should be avoided, but it can happen in legitimate circumstances, such as when upgrading the operating system to a new major version or when using pg_upgrade to upgrade to server binaries linked with a newer version of ICU. When this happens, all objects depending on the collation should be rebuilt, for example, using REINDEX. When that is done, the collation version can be refreshed using the command ALTER COLLATION ... REFRESH VERSION. This will update the system catalog to record the current collation version and will make the warning go away. Note that this does not actually check whether all affected objects have been rebuilt correctly 😭.

When using collations provided by libc, version information is recorded on systems using the GNU C library (most Linux systems), FreeBSD and Windows. When using collations provided by ICU, the version information is provided by the ICU library and is available on all platforms.

Note 🫶 When using the GNU C library for collations, the C library’s version is used as a proxy for the collation version. Many Linux distributions change collation definitions only when upgrading the C library, but this approach is imperfect as maintainers are free to back-port newer collation definitions to older C library releases. When using Windows for collations, version information is only available for collations defined with BCP 47 language tags such as en-US.

For the database default collation, there is an analogous command ALTER DATABASE ... REFRESH COLLATION VERSION.

The following query can be used to identify all collations in the current database that need to be refreshed and the objects that depend on them:

SELECT pg_describe_object(refclassid, refobjid, refobjsubid) AS "Collation",
       pg_describe_object(classid, objid, objsubid) AS "Object"
  FROM pg_depend d JOIN pg_collation c
       ON refclassid = 'pg_collation'::regclass AND refobjid = c.oid
  WHERE c.collversion <> pg_collation_actual_version(c.oid)
  ORDER BY 1, 2;

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💖 EXAMPLES 💖

To rename the collation de_DE to german:

ALTER COLLATION "de_DE" RENAME TO german;

To change the owner of the collation en_US to joe:

ALTER COLLATION "en_US" OWNER TO joe;

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🌈 COMPATIBILITY 🌈

There is no ALTER COLLATION statement in the SQL standard. Ngl, the SQL standard simply did not include this one 💀.

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

• CREATE COLLATION (CREATE_COLLATION(7)), DROP COLLATION (DROP_COLLATION(7)) — go read these next, bestie 🫶.

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That’s the whole ALTER COLLATION(7pg16) situation, bestie 💜 — from PostgreSQL 16.15, dated 2026, aka ALTER COLLATION(7). Go refresh responsibly ✨🦋💖.