The icu extension provides collation, time zone, and calendar support.

New In DuckDB 2.0, the dependency on the external ICU library was removed. The icu extension now implements collations, time zones, and calendars natively, with time zone data built directly from the IANA Time Zone Database. Behavior is unchanged, and the native implementation is smaller and faster. If you ship a custom build, note that ICU is no longer bundled.

Installing and Loading

The icu extension will be transparently autoloaded on first use from the official extension repository. If you would like to install and load it manually, run:

INSTALL AND LOAD icu;

Features

The icu extension introduces the following features:

• Region-dependent collations
• Time zones, used for timestamp data types and timestamp functions