CockroachDB recently gained support for Unicode collation, a standard for ordering strings in the different ways that our users around the world expect. This post describes the motivation for Unicode collation as well as the implementation challenges in providing collated strings as a first-class type. Collated strings are documented here. Note that CockroachDB doesn’t support every use of collation that PostgreSQL does, due in part to implementation deficiencies that we plan to address and in part because we believe that the bugs and performance problems caused by implicit type conversions outweigh their convenience. We’ve left the door open for full support, however.