title: Case-insensitive search using Hibernate
body: <p>I'm using Hibernate for ORM of my Java app to an Oracle database (not that the database vendor matters, we may switch to another database one day), and I want to retrieve objects from the database according to user-provided strings. For example, when searching for people, if the user is looking for people who live in 'fran', I want to be able to give her people in San Francisco.</p>
  
  <p>SQL is not my strong suit, and I prefer Hibernate's <code>Criteria</code> building code to hard-coded strings as it is. Can anyone point me in the right direction about how to do this in code, and if impossible, how the hard-coded SQL should look like?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks,</p>
  
  <p>Yuval =8-)</p>