accent-insenstitive text in CartoDB - PostGreSQL unaccent function missing?

Question

I am trying to do accent-insensitive text matching, but PostGreSQL's unaccent function doesn’t appear to be available

SELECT unaccent('Hôtel');

function unaccent(unknown) does not exist

Is this function supported somehow in CartoDB? If not, is there an alternative?

Answer 1

If you were running your own version of PostgreSQL, you'd need to build the extension, then CREATE it. Typically you'd go to your source and do something like

cd /usr/local/src/postgresql-9.3.4/contrib/unaccent make make install

and then in a psql session, you'd run

CREATE EXTENSION UNACCENT;

before you could use it. It doesn't seem as if CartoDB gives you access or permissions to do such a thing.