Postgres locale settings are inherited from OS

By default, postgres inherits locale settings from operating system, which can greatly affect sort. Comparing linux and unix, both using the locale en_US.UTF-8, we see the following sort outputs:

Unix

select name from unnest(array['No one', 'None', ' Not']) name order by name;
name
--------
 Not
No one
None

Linux

select name from unnest(array['No one', 'None', ' Not']) name order by name;
name
--------
None
No one
 Not

You'll notice that on the linux system, whitespaces are ignored during sorting.

To get consistent behavior across operating systems, you can use the postgres provided C locale:

select name from unnest(array['No one', 'None', ' Not']) name order by name collate 'C';
name
--------
 Not
No one
None