This pattern provides steps and sample code for using a scalar Python UDF (user-defined function) to set up case insensitive linguistic sorting for Amazon Redshift query results. It’s necessary to use a scalar Python UDF because Amazon Redshift returns results based on binary UTF-8 ordering and doesn’t support language-specific sorting. A Python UDF is non-SQL processing code that’s based on a Python 2.7 program and runs in a data warehouse. You can run Python UDF code with a SQL statement in a single query. For more information, see the Introduction to Python UDFs in Amazon Redshift AWS Big Data Blog post.
