man > ALTER_COLLATION(7)

ALTER COLLATION(7)                 PostgreSQL 16.14 Documentation                 ALTER COLLATION(7)

NAME
       ALTER_COLLATION - change the definition of a collation

SYNOPSIS
       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

DESCRIPTION
       ALTER COLLATION changes the definition of a collation.

       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.)

PARAMETERS
       name
           The name (optionally schema-qualified) of an existing collation.

       new_name
           The new name of the collation.

       new_owner
           The new owner of the collation.

       new_schema
           The new schema for the collation.

       REFRESH VERSION
           Update the collation's version. See Notes below.

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.

       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;

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;

COMPATIBILITY
       There is no ALTER COLLATION statement in the SQL standard.

SEE ALSO
       CREATE COLLATION (CREATE_COLLATION(7)), DROP COLLATION (DROP_COLLATION(7))

PostgreSQL 16.14                                2026                              ALTER COLLATION(7)