Re: case insensitive sorting & searching in oracle 10g - Mailing list pgsql-general

On Thu, 5 Aug 2004, David Garamond wrote:

> in oracle 10g, you can issue:
>
>   ALTER SESSION SET NLS_COMP = ansi;
>   ALTER SESSION SET NLS_SORT = binary_ci;
>
> do you think this is an elegant solution for case insensitive sorting &
> searching? is there interest in seeing this in postgres?

IMHO, no on both questions.  There's always danger on relying on the
value of session variables in general in that an application must either
set the variable immediately before sending queries that use it (breaking
the transparency) or must be willing to deal with the fact that it might
not be what you expect.  For the second, I don't see how this really does
much that the standard spec collation stuff can't do better and I'd think
that'd be a much better route to go.