unaccent support in PostgreSQL 8.4

[daniel2d2art]

unaccent not included for Posgresql 8.4, how work around?

[nertzy]

It might be possible. We haven't tested it.

This looks like it would work: https://launchpad.net/postgresql-unaccent

[nertzy]

I haven't been able to get it to work, so for now I've disabled it in version 0.3.2.

d5bf5ec Disable {:ignoring => :accents} in PostgreSQL 8.x

[gjones]

I installed the unaccent extension and it works a treat on my local, running 9.1.3, however Heroku's shared database option still seems to be running 8.3. Is there a patch available to fix this? I keep getting this when running heroku rake db:migrate.

PG::Error: ERROR: syntax error at or near "extension"
LINE 1: create extension unaccent

Thanks

[nertzy]

Yeah I don't think Heroku allows you to supply your own compiled PostgreSQL contrib packages for security reasons. And the CREATE EXTENSION syntax is new to PostgreSQL 9.1.

Heroku is working on a shared PostgreSQL 9.1 solution but I'm not sure how far along it is. https://addons.heroku.com/heroku-shared-postgresql

If stripping accents is an important concern, you could add an additional column to your model (called something like content or search_content) and have a before_validate hook on your model that copies over the appropriate text there and strips accents in the Ruby layer.

The disadvantage is that by caching the unaccented version in another column, you run the risk of the search_content going out-of-sync with the rest of the columns. For example, if you use update_attribute or another method that updates without calling callbacks.