I am facing a problem on SQL Server 2008 R2 where I have to use a contains search while ignoring German Umlaute-Letters (ä, ö, ü).
For all non German speaking developers: The German Umlaut-Letters can be represented as the regular underlying letter (a when using ä) and an e. So Müller is the same as Mueller and Bäcker is the same as Baecker.
What we want to do is this: When searching for "Müller" we would like to find data containing "Mueller" as well as "Müller" and when entering "Mueller" we would like to find entries containing "Müller" as well as "Mueller".
When comparing the data using like or = you just append COLLATE German_PhoneBook_CI_AI. When using a contains search with a full text index it is not that easy. You can set the accent sensitivity to off but then the contains search treats the ü-Letter like an u, the ä-Letter like an a and the ö letter like an o, it wont find the entries that contain oe instead of ö, ue instead of ü and ae instead of ä.
Setting the collation on the column to "German_Phonebook_CI_AS" or to "German_Phonebook_100_CI_AS" does not seem to help either.
Has anyone had the same problem before?