How to do a like case-insensitive and accent insensitive in Oracle 10gR2 and JPA?

Question

In a J2EE project, using JPA, how can I force a like query to be case insensitive and accent insensitive?

I know about changing session variables NLS_COMP and NLS_SO

Answer 1

(...) using JPA, how can I force a like query to be case insensitive and accent insensitive?

My answer will be JPQL oriented. For the former part, you could do:

where lower(name) like 'johny%';

For the later part, I'm not aware of a standard JPQL way to do it.

At the end, altering the session variables NLS_COMP and NLS_SORT is IMO the best option.