Re: Case Insensitive Queries

It appears that the behavior of a bpchar compare with a string literal
is not implicitly trimming the bpchar before the compare, which IMHO is
incorrect behavior.  Is my opinion valid?  If so, how difficult of a fix
would this be in terms of time and effort?  Should I submit a bug report
to another list, or is a developer receiving this?  Is this a feature?

This is an important issue for me, because I am converting a db from MS
SQL to postgresql.  The MS SQL database uses bpchar (or just char in MS
SQL terms) because performance is slightly better; the compares
automatically trim the blanks off of the char at compare time.  I have
over 150 tables to work with, and I would rather not have to change them
from bpchar to varchar, not to mention the performance decrease this
might incur.

You might be thinking, 'just use trim(username) everywhere you compare'.
Yes, that is a solution, but not a practical one in my case.  If this is
a bug, I don't want to hack around it: I'd rather wait for the fix.
Varchars would incur performance penalties I want to try to avoid if at
all possible.

Thanks,

Mark

On 29 May 2001 09:55:18 -0700, Dan Lyke wrote:
> Mark writes:
> > Is it possible to execute a query using a where clause that allows
case
> > insensitive comparison between a field and text.
> 
> select * from account where upper(username) = upper('test')
> 
> (Upper used because, as has been remarked on this list and in other
places,
> folding from richer character sets is likely to get better matches
this way).
> 
> And yes, you can create an index on upper(fieldname).
> 
> Dan
> 
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