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Asked: 2026-05-10T18:47:02+00:00

I need to add the ability for users of my software to select records

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I need to add the ability for users of my software to select records by character ranges.
How can I write a query that returns all widgets from a table whose name falls in the range Ba-Bi for example?

Currently I’m using greater than and less than operators, so the above example would become:

select * from widget where name >= 'ba' and name < 'bj'

Notice how I have ‘incremented’ the last character of the upper bound from i to j so that ‘bike’ would not be left out.

Is there a generic way to find the next character after a given character based on the field’s collation or would it be safer to create a second condition?

select * from widget where name >= 'ba' and (name < 'bi' or name like 'bi%')

My application needs to support localization. How sensitive is this kind of query to different character sets?

I also need to support both MSSQL and Oracle. What are my options for ensuring that character casing is ignored no matter what language appears in the data?

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1 Answer

  1. Let’s skip directly to localization. Would you say ‘aa’ >= ‘ba’ ? Probably not, but that is where it sorts in Sweden. Also, you simply can’t assume that you can ignore casing in any language. Casing is explicitly language-dependent, with the most common example being Turkish: uppercase i is İ. Lowercase I is ı.

    Now, your SQL DB defines the result of <, == etc by a ‘collation order’. This is definitely language specific. So, you should explicitly control this, for every query. A Turkish collation order will put those i’s where they belong (in Turkish). You can’t rely on the default collation.

    As for the ‘increment part’, don’t bother. Stick to >= and <=.

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