Louis Davidson walks through different permutations of case in a data set:
The other day, I had a problem with some data that I never dreamed I would ever see. In a case insensitive database, in a table’s column that was case insensitive, the customer was using the data as case sensitive. Firstly, let’s just go ahead and say it. “This was a sucky implementation.” But as is common, in my typical role as a data architect in the data warehousing team, I get to learn all sorts of interesting techniques for finding and dealing with “data” that has been used in “interesting” ways.
What is kind of interesting is actually figuring out what that duplicated data was. The case that I was dealing with wasn’t a kind of useful packed surrogate value, where you may use a base 62 number, with a-z, A-Z and 0-9 as characters. So 1, 2, … , 9, 0, a, b, c, … x, y, z, A, B.. etc. 1A1 is a different value in that sequence than 1a1, and is greater . Neat technique, and one that I have been threatening to develop using a SEQUENCE object, where you can pack in a lot of sequential data in a small number of bytes. No, this wasn’t a useful case such as this, in this case, one value was lower case, another had leading capitals. So perhaps “active customer” and “Active Customer”. Yeah, seriously, they meant different things.
Louis shows some of the nuance required in making this work.