I have an iOS Objective C app using fmdb. Using this query successfully until I have run into Hebrew language. Apparently, in Hebrew the vowels characters are optional and some of the strings in the database have vowels and some do not. So, I need to make the comparison ignoring the vowels. @"SELECT * FROM buttons WHERE LOWER ( TRIM (message) ) = LOWER ( TRIM (\"%@\") )" (don't worry the user was not able to enter the string that goes into the %@) I have considered creating a separate column of words with vowels stripped to use for Hebrew but then there will be many special cases in the code to deal with this. Possibly, I don't understand the collation sequence but I don't this helps here as vowels are to be ignored not reordered. TIA for your suggestions.