Re: Use of !~* to keep a varchar column UNIQUE

On Fri, August 18, 2006 1:52 pm, Don Morrison said:

> The above works well enough, and I can live with it, but it is not
> comprehensive...it would be nice to use a regular expression....and do
> something like:

The other way of doing this, depending on your data integrety needs, would
be to use a before trigger on insert, which could trim the space and
convert to some normalized case.  PL/Perl would be a good language for
this.  ;)

Of course that has the problem of changing the data before it is inserted.
 It is up to you to decide if this change reperesnts a problem in your
particular case.  (I would think it probably would cause the database to
run a little faster: The processing only would happen once, at insert
time, instead of whenever the index is re-created.  Probably not
significant in most cases though.)

Daniel T. Staal

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