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I used Postgres since 1995 ( [PG95] mailing list has less than 400 subscribers !) for my scientific projects and operating with numbers and english strings was smooth, but in 1996 I signed up to make a searchable database of electronic archive of "Учительская газета" (a popular newspaper for teachers community). I took this project for additional income to help me raise my kids. Our office was located in Vetoshny Lane, near the Read Square, I had a lot of fun working there with smart people.

I claimed to be an expert in Postgres and didn't see any problem with loading the archive and writing several SQL queries.

First, I quickly found that cyrillic letters transformed to something unreadable. The problem was that Postgres operated with ASCII only, which isn't surprising given its roots in English world, so practically it was impossible to use any national encodings  like russians koi8-r, cp-1251, cp-866, etc. That time I already participated in internationalization of perl and search engine glimpse, so I knew that basically I need to replace  'char' definiton to 'unsigned char', add call setlocale(LC_ALL,"") and use functions from locale api. The reality is getting a bit more complicated than I anticipated, so it took a month to get a working Postgres on Slackware.

The second problem I found is that postgres works very slow with text,  it was not only because of locale stuff — strcoll is 10 times slower that strcmp, but since Postgres used full scan — read every row of a table and performs slow text operation. This problem was addressed by me and Teodor in 2000, when we developed OpenFTS, contrib/intarray, which was eventually transformed to built-in full-text search (FTS), which we presented at the PostgreSQL Anniversary Meeting in Toronto, 2006.  

I chose to use Postgres over Oracle in 2000, when we developed the Rambler portal (the biggest portal in Russia with millions of users), since I believed that we could do everything having sources and nice support from mailing list.

I handled the pressure of Rambler investor and top management, who wanted Oracle to pass an audit by PWC. Just for reference, we started with Postgres 6.5.2 (no WAL!)  gradually adding GiST framework, contrib/intarray, OpenFTS, tsearch v1. Thanks to Rambler, all this work became eventually part of Postgres!

https://obartunov.livejournal.com/211100.html