At 02:46 PM 12/11/2004 -0700, you wrote:

>I'm trying to determine the general conventions that developers use for
>searching Firebird (or any other SQL database) relating to upper/lower case
>searching.
>
>The data in our search fields will be stored as mixed Upper Case/Lower case
>textual data, but when we search for a matching value I'm not sure what the
>best strategy is for this. One of our developers wanted to develop a UDF
>for this, but I can't see why this is required.
>
>If I want to seach a text field for 'Smith', and the values in the database
>are referenced as 'SMITH', 'Smith', and 'smith' what is the best way to
>handle this in an application?

Since (I think!) you're using IBO, you could also post your question to the
IBO list...IBO has built-in support for using trigger-populated, indexed
proxy columns for fast searches.

./hb