Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Data Management:
DataServer for Microsoft SQL Server

Case sensitivity

By default, an OpenEdge database is case insensitive. MS SQL Server is also case insensitive by default. Using case insensitivity in both OpenEdge and MSS enables seamless compatibility between the two, and provides the best performance, and least maintenance. However, you can set the attributes of a field to define it as either case sensitive or case insensitive. If you intend to use case sensitivity, consider the following:

Pattern-matching literals in data source access statements retrieve case sensitive data.
The OpenEdge database considers the user ID and password submitted at connection time to be case sensitive.

If an indexed field is case insensitive, an OpenEdge database does not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters for that index when sorting or matching data. In general, this flexibility in an application makes data entry easier for end users because they can enter lowercase or uppercase versions of an index. However, if you want to enforce an uppercase/lowercase distinction in your applications, set the attribute to case sensitive.

If you are using a case sensitive code page, the DataServer can make this feature compatible across OpenEdge and MSS data sources. To support case insensitivity with a case sensitive code page, an extra column, known as a shadow column, must be added to the data source immediately before the indexed column. In most cases, this column is named _S#_column (exceptions are noted in the following sections). See the "Migrating an OpenEdge database to MS SQL Server" section for instructions on adding this column automatically with the Progress-to-MSS utility.

Note: By default, sort order in MS SQL Server is not case sensitive.