Symfony makes heavy use of Propel. Propel finds objects in the storage container using criteria. If you want to let Propel (okay the database) ignore the case you can set this in the criteria.

$c = new Criteria ();
 
// Allow case sensitive searches
$c->setIgnoreCase (true);
 
// Find all posts which name contains propel
$c->add (BlogPostPeer::NAME, 'Propel');
 
$posts = BlogPostPeer::doSelect ($c);

Because PostgreSQL (unlike MySQL) does not support collations to easily manage how comparisons of strings are done Propel has to generate this sql-statement.

SELECT blog_posts.name, blog_posts.DATE
FROM blog_posts
WHERE UPPER(blog_posts.name) = 'PROPEL';

Depending on your amount of data this can become very slow even if you have an index defined for the "name"-column.

The trick is to create another index for the column "name".

CREATE INDEX "UpperNameIndex" ON blog_posts USING BTREE (UPPER(name));

Thats it. When now using setIgnoreCase its fast again.