Hi, I'm currently using Firebird 1.5.3.

I have a column called 'MyText', varchar(100). This column may contain
works with accents, eg "hát" (the second character has an accent - it
is U 00E1). For searching purposes, I need to be able to find this
word regardless of case. Always performing an 'UPPER()' on this column
is slow (there are a lot of rows), so for performance I added another
column 'MyUText'.

In IBExpert I ran 'update MyTable set MyUText = upper(MyText)', but
this does not convert all characters; in the above example "hát"
becomes "HáT" (the second character was not uppercased).

1) Is it possible for firebird to 'upper' characters with accents
also? Do I need to change the way the MyUText column is defined (eg a
particular codeset)? I accepted all defaults, locales, codesets, etc
when I first created the database.

2) Is it possible for firebird to convert accented characters to
non-accented ones (where an equivalent exists)? Then for example I
could search for "HAT" and find "hát" (where the equivalent -
uppercased - was "HAT").

3) I need to add a trigger so that whenever MyText is modified (or a
row added) then MyUText is updated. This may only be practical if (1)
is possible; otherwise, I'll have to do the conversion through my java
code. Since MyText is updated from many different areas, a trigger
would be preferable.

Any comments? Are there any enhancements in Firebird v2 that are
relevant here?
Thanks,
Phil