One challenge we face is that many users are likely to be considering Derby as an alternative to MySQL which by default uses a case-insensitive collation. This is legal SQL, just different from most other databases (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server (which actually allows you to choose when you create the database)).
The standard way of solving this would be to support user-specified character sets and collations per the spec but
1) that's likely to be a lot of work
2) I don't know of another database that actually does this the way
the spec says, making us "different", and
3) it is likely to be more confusing than helpful
Other options include: a) support collation specification at the schema level like SQL Server b) support function-based indexes, so users can create indexes on UPPER(col) to reduce the performance hit c) just document and offer workarounds (like adding a second column) d) change Derby to be like MySQL (gets a -1 from me but ...)
Thoughts? -- Jeremy
