Data and Technology: July 2009

MySQL on default installation uses the case insensitive configuration meaning the data you stored and searched will not be case sensitive.

Let us first check our current server and database's appropariate variables.

SHOW VARIABLES
WHERE variable_name = 'character_set_server'

> latin1

SHOW VARIABLES
WHERE variable_name = 'collation_database'

> latin1_swedish_ci

Since we are using latin based language settings, the cases are different unlike some languages that don't have cases. And with the database collation set to latin_swedish_ci the string search will be case insensitive (ci).

For this illustration, I have created a table "country" with single column "country_name" and inserted 3 rows.

CREATE TABLE country (
     country_name varchar(32) NOT NULL
);
INSERT INTO country
VALUES ('US'), ('UK'), ('ukraine')
; 
COMMIT;

I use Google docs to maintain many documentations for a non-profit organization and this has been a very useful, money & time saving application. In my view, following three features will immediately enhance what is already a excellent collaborative product. These are low-hanging fruits.

User access control at worksheet level to view
Copying more than 1000 (one thousand cells) at a time
Multi-column sorting

In our non-profit organization we have multiple chapters controlling their own documents/ spreadsheets and some times there are situations where I would like to have a single spreadsheet but each work sheet is visible only to a particular chapter or member. For example, a common spreadsheet with 50 worksheets (one for each US state) should appropriately be visible to these chapters. A California chapter can view California worksheet only and not others.

Currently, I can control the editing access through "Protect Sheet" but not the viewing. See below.

Case Sensitive SQL Search

Google Docs Spreadsheet - Better access control needed