PostgreSQL How to make case-insensitive query

Question

Is there any way to write case-insensitive queries in PostgreSQL  E g  I want that following 3 queries return same result   SELECT id FROM groups where name  administrator   SELECT id FROM groups where name  ADMINISTRATOR   SELECT id FROM groups where name  Administrator

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You can also read up on the ILIKE keyword  It can be quite useful at times  albeit it does not conform to the SQL standard  See here for more information  http   www postgresql org docs 9 2 static functions-matching html

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The most common approach is to either lowercase or uppercase the search string and the data  But there are two problems with that    It works in English  but not in all languages   Maybe not even in most languages   Not every lowercase letter has a corresponding uppercase letter  not every uppercase letter has a corresponding lowercase letter  Using functions like lower   and upper   will give you a sequential scan  It can t use indexes  On my test system  using lower   takes about 2000 times longer than a query that can use an index   Test data has a little over 100k rows     There are at least three less frequently used solutions that might be more effective    Use the citext module  which mostly mimics the behavior of a case-insensitive data type  Having loaded that module  you can create a case-insensitive index by CREATE INDEX ON groups  name  citext     But see below   Use a case-insensitive collation  This is set when you initialize a database  Using a case-insensitive collation means you can accept just about any format from client code  and you ll still return useful results   It also means you can t do case-sensitive queries  Duh   Create a functional index  Create a lowercase index by using CREATE INDEX ON groups  LOWER name     Having done that  you can take advantage of the index with queries like SELECT id FROM groups WHERE LOWER name    LOWER  ADMINISTRATOR     or SELECT id FROM groups WHERE LOWER name     administrator   You have to remember to use LOWER    though      The citext module doesn t provide a true case-insensitive data type  Instead  it behaves as if each string were lowercased  That is  it behaves as if you had called lower   on each string  as in number 3 above  The advantage is that programmers don t have to remember to lowercase strings  But you need to read the sections  String Comparison Behavior  and  Limitations  in the docs before you decide to use citext

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using ILIKE instead of LIKE  SELECT id FROM groups WHERE name ILIKE  Administrator

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Using    can improve greatly on performance  with functionality of INSTR    SELECT id FROM groups WHERE name     adm    return rows with name that contains OR equals to  adm

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You could also use POSIX regular expressions  like  SELECT id FROM groups where name     administrator    SELECT  asd      AsD  returns t

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You can use ILIKE  i e   SELECT id FROM groups where name ILIKE  administrator

User · Answer

Use LOWER function to convert the strings to lower case before comparing   Try this   SELECT id    FROM groups  WHERE LOWER name  LOWER  Administrator

[postgresql] PostgreSQL: How to make "case-insensitive" query

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