case sensitive solutions requested for odbc with oracle and sql-server.

I am looking into solutions with case sensitive for storing data, (preferable mixed)
sorting data, (lower case should be equal to upper case) indexing, (should be done case insensitive) finding data, (how to do that).

Our application works through an ODBC interface, to an Oracle or SQL-server database.
The SQL-server database can be defined case-insensitive. This is allright by us.
What steps do we take to use the same solution (client application) to use Oracle in
a case-insensitive matter ?

I have tried to track old messages with Deja but didn't come up with a definitive answer and
there were a lot of messages I couldn't reach or read (language barrier).

Suggestions seen so far are using UPPER (or LOWER) but UPPER seems to be the preferred way,
or converting the complete database to upper or lower. Or using extra colums which contain the
converted data. To my understanding a mixed case index will not work if you don't use the exactly
same mixed case while searching.
What solutions do other database programmers use for this problem ?

Thanks for your attention, have a nice day, stef,

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