Re: SV: Case sensitive field names - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Hannu Krosing
Subject Re: SV: Case sensitive field names
Date
Msg-id 39D11A98.3D810849@tm.ee
Whole thread Raw
In response to SV: Case sensitive field names  ("Jarmo Paavilainen" <netletter@comder.com>)
List pgsql-hackers
Jarmo Paavilainen wrote:
> 
> ...
> > > Is there a way to make postgre insensitive about field name cases?
> > >
> > > Like
> "initdb --fields-are-case-insensitive --compares-are-case-insensitive"
> ...
> > The main problem I see with case-insensitivity is the fact that there
> > are always more than one way to do it, as it depends on charset _and_
> locale ;(
> >
> > For example 'Ä'=='ä' in my locale but not in US, not to mention that in
> > some locales even the character count may change when going from upper to
> > lower case.
> 
> Thats not really a problem with field names. *I think* you should always use

What do you mean by "should" ;)

> ASCII chars in fieldnames (and only those between 32 (space) and 'z'.

hannu=> create table "bõv"("gbzöh" int);
CREATE
hannu=> \d bõv
Table    = bõv
+----------------------------------+----------------------------------+-------+
|              Field               |              Type                |
Length|
+----------------------------------+----------------------------------+-------+
| gbzöh                            | int4                            
|     4 |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------------+-------+

> And PostgreSQL should cope with case insensitive search. If not, then I can
> not use it.
> 
> Can PostgreSQL do a case insensitive search?

Postgres can do CI regular expressions :

select * from books where title ~* '.*Tom.*');


case insensitive LIKE is not directly supported , but you can do
something like

select * from books where upper(title) LIKE upper('%Tom%');

> 
> ...
> > arbitraryly-case-altering OS-es, like the ones Microsoft produces.
> 
> Yeah and microsoft SQL server can do a case insensitive search, so can
> Sybase (at least the Win versions).

IIRC, MSSQL == Sybase (at least older versions of MSSQL)

> 
> > You could also try just uppercasing anything outside ''/"" even before
> > it is passed to backend.
> 
> No good, because field values should keep case (even if you search on them
> case insensitive). But then again to use " as a field value delimiter is
> illegal, isnt it?

I understood that you wanted field _names_ to be case-insensitive, not
field values.

Field names are delimited by "", values of type string by ''

---------------
Hannu


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