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AskSQLTeam
Ask SQLTeam Question
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 Posted - 2002-06-06 : 10:16:42
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| Joey writes "What are the benefits and costs of installing SQL Server with case-sensitivity? When would case-sensitivity be a good idea? When would it be a bad idea?" |
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robvolk
Most Valuable Yak
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Posted - 2002-06-06 : 10:30:10
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| Material cost is nothing, no dollar amount is involved. Case-senstive programming may take a little longer, because it's more exacting, but once you get the hang of it it's no worse than just regular everyday programming.Case-sensitive servers perform faster, but it depends on what kind of environment the databases are supporting. Case sensitive would work well in a relatively closed environment with superb data quality and integrity constraints. Say, an engineering group where the end users are usually methodical people who understand computers very well. If you are programming something for the average internet user however, case sensitivity will lead to insanity on your part.For instance, data entry of names; if they always get entered in proper case (first letter Capitalized, remaining letters lower case) then the data will be consistent and you'll get maximum benefit. However, if you have data that gets entered all lower or upper case, or some other mix, case-sensitivity will really hinder efficient querying and searching. Names like D'Angelo could sort before D'angelico, because upper case letters sort higher than lower case (you can change the sort to use dictionary instead of binary) Imagine a web search engine that was case sensitive, and you entered "smith" or "sql server" and got NO matches at all, and you can see the potential problems.If you have a case senstive server and need to do insensitive matches, it's much harder than doing it the other way around, and whatever performance benefit you get from case sensitivity would be lost.I would recommend against case-sensitive unless you are a seasoned programmer/developer and you can apply rigid control over data quality and usage. It's extremely frustrating for a relative beginner to be shackled with that extra burden (if you've ever gone from Visual Basic to C++ or Java/JavaScript, you KNOW what I mean!) And the performance benefit is usually not that crucial anyway, there are a number of other things you can do that will make a greater improvement that just switching to case sensitive.Edited by - robvolk on 06/06/2002 10:32:38 |
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cost/benefit of case-sensitive install