Case sensitivity

Bruce Richardson wrote:

Discovering that text fields in Postgres are case sensitive - so "Text"
<> "text" and both can go into the same UNIQUE column - threw me a bit,
as this is different from other databases I've worked with.

Well, they are different, aren't they?

Is there a toggle to turn off case sensitivity, either for a whole
database or for a column? Or do I just have to get used to ~*?

You can create a unique index on lower(column); ~* is very nice,
any way.

--
Oliver Elphick Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk
Isle of Wight http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
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On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Bruce Richardson wrote:

Discovering that text fields in Postgres are case sensitive - so "Text"
<> "text" and both can go into the same UNIQUE column - threw me a bit,
as this is different from other databases I've worked with.

Is there a toggle to turn off case sensitivity, either for a whole
database or for a column? Or do I just have to get used to ~*?

No, you can't turn it off, and yes, many people do notice that it's not
the way some other databases work. (Some database make this configurable).

You can use ~*, you can also index on function results (eg, you can create
an index on a function. So, you could

create unique index yourtable_pkey on yourtable ( upper(pkeyfield));

which would only allow one 'Joel', regardless of how you cap me.

--
Joel Burton <jburton@scw.org>
Director of Information Systems, Support Center of Washington