Case Insensitive and Accent Insensitive Queries

Query features provide indexes that directly support case insensitive and accent insensitive (CIAI) queries on eligible text columns. CIAI queries ignore both the case and use of accents to return all records that otherwise match the query criteria. This capability is important when searching for records such as contact or customer names. For example, an exact-match query produces different a query results than a CIAI query if the query results contain capitalization inconsistencies (such as MacArthur and Macarthur) or accent usage inconsistencies.

CIAI queries apply to the entire query string. To find out if your application uses exact-match queries or CIAI queries, run test queries and review the query results.

A case-insensitive query works on all supported databases for the current release of the application. However, an accent-insensitive query works only on the databases that provide the accent-insensitivity feature, such as Microsoft Structured Query Language (SQL).