Case Sensitivity #

String comparisons in PostgreSQL are case sensitive* (unless a case-insensitive collation were to be introduced). To work around this, PostgreSQL has several methods to match strings in a case-insensitive manner. Consequently, Marten also makes use of these methods to translate case-insensitive queries to pgSQL. See querying document with Linq for querying by strings.

Case-Insensitivity & Marten Internals #

Marten query parser recognizes case-insensitive comparisons from the use of StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase. Such comparisons are translated to use the ILIKE (or its equivalent operator ~~*) PostgreSQL extension that matches strings independent of case.

The use of ILIKE pattern match in place of equality comparison has the consequence that matching on % wildcard literal needs to be escaped as \%, e.g. abc% would match on abc followed by any characters, whereas abc\% would only match the exact string of abc%.

See Postgresql documentation on pattern matching for more.