Fixing PostgreSQL's default encoding on Ubuntu 9.10 December 12th, 2009

Ubuntu 9.10 installs PostgreSQL with a default encoding of SQL_ASCII. This is dumb: SQL_ASCII basically means “I don’t care about the encoding of my data; just store garbage.” This is especially annoying since PostgreSQL will actually prevent you from creating new databases with a different encoding: if you try, you’ll be told that the “new encoding (UTF8) is incompatible with the encoding of the template database (SQL_ASCII).” My fix was to just blow away the default cluster and re-create it with a UTF8 encoding.…