If your issue is that you are storing character data and want to do case-insensitive matching on it, then you need to make sure that the data you are comparing are all in the same case. If you are doing the conversion on the Perl side, use the functions lc and uc or, if you're doing it on the database side, use the standard SQL functions LOWER and UPPER.

My experience is that you'll see vastly better performance if you store the data in all lowercase andor all uppercase, so that when you do the comparison against user data later, you don't need to call UPPER or LOWER on the actual data column, which will make the comparison much slower. This is a form of normalization.

Update: Corrected tiredness-induced conjunction error.

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