Re: Oracle can be Case Insensitive ?

On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, howardjr2000_at_yahoo.com.au wrote:
>
> No, Rob, it can't be case insensitive, because we live in a
> case sensitive world.

What world are you talking about? There are boatloads of reasons that case insensitivity is needed to be supported, throughout our world.

Go to asktom. Type in dbms_output and then DBMS_OUTPUT. You get the same number of hits. Then, when you look at the two answers, you see that the application code turned it to lower. Okay, yeah, I see, he did this little workaround to give the _illusion_ of a case insensitive world to the users of his site. But, when one searches his site, they are in a case insensitive mindset. When I'm on a search site, that is my world for that moment, and that world is case insensitive. Just one example of the fact that we don't live in a case-insensitive world. We live in a world that has different flavors of case sensitivity for the different situations. But, Oracle only supports the case sensitive version of any of these. The application programmers have to program for the rest of those cases, exactly as people suggest, upper/lower()...

The real boon would be that, when people are designing systems, and they either overlook case-sensitivity, or decide incorrectly, later, they aren't stuck with a huge-architectural decision to make based on this limitation.

I'm sure if Oracle gave one the facility to directly tie a sequence to a single table only, we would add that to a long list of reasons to crow. But, instead, when SQLServer folks rightfully complain that this functionality doesn't exist, we claim that sequences by themselves are better than the SQLServer identity columns. Well, yes, of course they are. But, more often than not, in usage people have a one-to-one relationship between a sequence and a table. Having to write a trigger to accomplish this is far more work than defining an identity column on a table.

-- 
Galen Boyer