ORACLE 11g case insensitive by default

Question

I found in this article, that since ORACLE 10g, there is a way to make a particular connection-session compare strings case-insensitive, without needing any crazy SQL functi

Answer 1

You could just set the NLS_SORT, NLS_COMP parameters mentioned in the article as the values in the the Oracle init file using the alter system set = ; clause.

Info on using the alter system commands can be found here.

Here is a good link on the correct usage of the NLS_* parameters. Note that some settings of of the NLS_SORT parameter can/could cause performance issues, namely when it is not set to BINARY. The Oracle docs state:

Setting NLS_SORT to anything other than BINARY causes a sort to use a full table scan, regardless of the path chosen by the optimizer. BINARY is the exception because indexes are built according to a binary order of keys. Thus the optimizer can use an index to satisfy the ORDER BY clause when NLS_SORT is set to BINARY. If NLS_SORT is set to any linguistic sort, the optimizer must include a full table scan and a full sort in the execution plan.