I’ve been using LIKE for ages which is a useful way to search for part of a word or phrase in a db field.
$conditions = array( 'TABLE.field LIKE'=>'%'.$search_term.'%');
Now i didn’t realise that this wasn’t case sensitive meaning that ‘Ultra’ returned results but ‘ultra’ didn’t.
So to make it case insensitive you can do the following:
$conditions = array('UPPER(TABLE.field) LIKE'=>'%'.strtoupper($search_term).'%');
Not much different but now a useful(UPPER) addition to the sql arsenal.
